Agile Requirements Process: From Idea to Minimum Viable Product
By Rusty Divine
Course info
Course info
Description
This course will teach developers, business analysts, project managers, and entrepreneurs a definite process to prepare for building a new software solution that will garner a shared vision for the project and lead to a minimum viable product. The course will teach how to create a flexible project plan with prioritized features, estimated level of effort, and a preliminary design that is ready for an agile development team to start building. Students will actively participate in the analysis of an example project so that they can get hands-on experience with the process. After taking this course, students will know how much up front analysis is enough to get an agile project started, tips to convince their organization to use this process, and how they may use these skills to develop their own software ideas.
About the author
Rusty Divine is technical lead, presenter, and blogger who lives in Nebraska and works with a happy team of agile developers. Rusty specializes in .Net web applications for businesses and enjoys working with customers and stakeholders, coaching developers, and grilling gourmet burgers.
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Section Introduction Transcripts
Preparation for the Requirements Meeting
Welcome to Module 2, Preparation for the Requirements Meeting. You have a meeting to run; you'll be standing up in front of everyone and directing the meeting. How do you prepare for something like that? How do you make sure all of the attendees are prepared? No one enjoys a meeting that is not well planned and facilitated. So in this module, you will learn how to prepare your customer and your team for a productive agile requirements meeting. You will see how to scale the agenda of the meeting to fit the project, and how you should prepare the meeting room for the best results. Let's start by looking at an agenda for an average meeting, so that you have a good reference for the rest of this module.
Example Requirements Meeting
Welcome to Module 3, an Example Requirements Meeting. Do you have an idea for some software that you would like to have? If so, then you can use your idea as you follow along with this module, and by the end you will have a clear vision for what the software can be, and a prioritized roadmap for how you want to get there. You will have considered who would need to use this software and have brainstormed features for each of the roles of users that you can identify. If you would rather just follow along and watch, then you will still get a good amount of experience out of this module, because we will be doing an example requirements meeting for a fictitious programmer's user-group website. I'll explain more about that in the next clip.
Creating the Project Plan
The agile workshop meeting is done, and now it's time to pull together a project plan and estimate. We'll keep this plan as simple as we can, so that we don't waste time with any designs that may never be built. You can expect to put in around 40 hours of work to get a good plan together that includes all the notes from the meeting and the features organized, and each one size-estimated, some preliminary designs and mockups, and a price and schedule estimate. Let's get started by compiling our meeting notes first.
Introduction to Working the Project
Congratulations, you've landed the project. But now what? Every team will have its own process that works for them. In this module, I want to share with you the process one enterprise agile team that I have worked on follows to give you an idea of one way you can manage a software project. Maybe some of things we do will work for your team, and maybe you'll reach out to me and other viewers in the discussion area of this course, to tell us some fundamental processes that work for your team.