Course Overview:

Everyone complains that poor requirements are the major cause of project problems. Yet, like the weather, nobody does much about it, at least not effectively. Traditional approaches advocate writing voluminous requirements documents that too often don’t seem to help much and may even contribute to difficulties. Agile goes to the opposite extreme, relying on brief requirements in the form of three-line user stories that fit on the front an index card and a few user story acceptance criteria that fit on the card’s back. Surprise, as Mark Twain noted, in some ways it’s even harder to write Agile’s brief requirements effectively. This interactive workshop reveals reasons user stories and their acceptance tests can fall short of their hype, explains critical concepts needed for effectiveness, and uses a real case to provide participants guided practice writing and evaluating user stories and their acceptance criteria/tests.

Participants will learn:

* Major sources of poor requirements that cause defects, rework, and cost/time overruns.
* How Agile user stories and their acceptance criteria/tests address these issues.
* Difficulties that still afflict requirements in Agile projects and why they persist.
* Writing more effective user stories and acceptance criteria/tests.
* What else is necessary to produce working software that provides real value.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND: This course has been designed for product owners, analysts, developers, and other Agile (and other) project team members who are or should be involved in defining requirements.