Exploring Agility

User Stories are an approach to Agile requirements, that drive collaboration and bring the focus on value and the end user. User stories have become a common tool for most Agile teams. This training is hands-on and allows attendees to experience the life cycle of a User Story, going from Vision, through to the creation of well-formed stories. The course can be based around a real project and run as a training/workshop, or it can be run as a pure training course.

Objectives
• Attendees will have a common understanding of how Agile projects are shaped, going from Vision to User Stories that are Ready for teams
• Experience new techniques that can be applied when collaboratively shaping Agile projects
• Create an opportunity to have open discussion about how you work, identifying opportunities to better support an Agile way of working

Day 1 – Framing the Work (The Big Picture)
On the first day attendees will choose a project that will form the basis of the rest of the course, using the project attendees will start to experience techniques that are used when shaping Agile projects.
• Introductions
• The Africa Project – A warm up activity to get you thinking
• The role of the Product Owner
• The Vision
• Strategic Planning
• What are User Stories
• What makes a good User Story
• Gathering Stories
• End of Day Retrospective (what do we need to make sure we do tomorrow)

Day 2 – Refining the Work (Getting to Ready)
The second day will see attendees creating User Stories for their project, assigning value to them, breaking them down and writing tests for them. There will also be time to discuss emerging topics.
• Working the Backlog
• Ordering the Backlog
• Breaking Down Stories
• Acceptance Tests
• Business Analysis in Scrum
• Scaling work across multiple teams
• End of Course Retrospective (what are you going to do differently)