Tips for Good Agile Requirements

Transcription

1 Whitepaper 9 Tips for Good Agile Requirements

2 Organizations are finding that they need better ways to develop the applications that are critical to the enterprise. The existing old-fashioned methods are too slow and cumbersome to meet the competitive demands of being nimble and responsive. Quite simply, you need to be more Agile than traditional methods allow. In this whitepaper, we go over nine tips of Enterprise Agile requirements that you need to know. 1. User Stories Don t Tell The Full Story User stories play a big and essential role in helping to define Enterprise Agile requirements. But don t forget about other devices necessary to guide acceptance criteria and the Definition of Done. Non-Functional Requirements are frequently omitted on Agile projects, which results in ambiguity. Define Non-Functional Requirements in a central location where they can be tied into the Acceptance Criteria of multiple user stories and shared across projects. Business Rules are also essential for guiding the acceptable implementation of user stories. 2. Don t Forget Analysis Limited analysis has the same impact on Agile projects as it has in Waterfall: poor prioritization, lack of scope control, and missed requirements. Some important things to remember about analyzing your business: Analysis still occurs in Agile to prepare for future Sprints. You need to clearly understand business objectives. Associate user stories with business objectives to aid in backlog prioritization. Associate user stories with features or themes to help identify missing user stories 3. Invest In Your Acceptance Criteria The quality and detail of the acceptance criteria of user stories has a direct relationship with the amount of rework from which your project will suffer. Some tips: Remember that developers are not the only consumers of acceptance criteria. They are also vital for successful testing. Write acceptance criteria in Given/When/Then format to improve testability. Acceptance criteria written in a consistent format enables automated testing. Include functional and non-functional expectations. 2

3 4. Lean On A Framework For Scaling Here are some things you need to remember about using a framework for Enterprise Agile projects: Frameworks for Enterprise Agile are proving themselves to be very useful. Most experts agree that you would be well advised to use a framework. SAFe and DAD are two popular, and largely complementary, Enterprise Agile frameworks. The Spotify approach is gaining popularity. Blueprint for Agile focuses specifically on the requirements aspect of Agile at scale, and is compatible with both SAFe and DAD (as well as project-focused Agile methods). 5. Stagger Your Horizons An Agile project typically has a number of different audiences, each with its own perspective. As you work through your project, don t forget the following important points: Agile teams that primarily focus on their next few sprints, can lose track of the big picture and operate in a silo. Other stakeholders that are outside of the silo, such as those involved with regulatory compliance, still need to be able to influence projects. Understanding dependencies across Agile teams is critical for project success. Strategic thinking and consideration for the longer-term business vision is still critical for success in Agile organizations. 6. Get Visual Being visual with your requirements presents a better story than simply using text to describe requirements. Here are some important points to remember about how you can best make use of the visual elements: Visual models such as process flows and system context diagrams can be used to link individual stories to the big picture, which enables developers consuming those stories to understand how to implement a solution. Visual models such as state diagrams and mockups can also be leveraged to add clarity to the acceptance criteria of a User Story. Getting visual will allow you to communicate easily with stakeholders and will go a long way to improving Business-IT alignment. Visualization has proven itself in every other engineering discipline as the premier way to analyze and communicate complex ideas with multiple audiences and to provide a single, common vision. 3

4 7. Define Your Roles Different people fulfill different roles in an Agile environment: Stereotypical Waterfall roles such as the Product Manager and Business Analyst are morphing and changing. The Product Owner is supposed to understand the market, interview stakeholders, identify stories, prioritize and elaborate stories, and keep the team moving at velocity. This proves too much for one role in many organizations, so they move to an external/internal approach. A Product Manager will focus on the external aspects of the product owner role (and is often referred to as the Product Owner): market and competitive analysis, product vision, delivering epics and shell user stories, and prioritizing user stories. A Business Analyst will focus on the internal tasks: user story elaboration, analysis, and keeping the team moving at velocity. To avoid disaster you need to clearly define these roles in your organization before the project starts. 8. Yes, You Need A Sprint 0 Agile takes a very different approach in that teams should do just enough work up front rather than complete the analysis and design for the entire project. Consider these points before kicking off a project: Big Requirements Up Front (BRUF) is not a recommended approach. Don t get stuck in Analysis Paralysis. Defining no requirements up front is just as bad for different reasons. Make sure to spend some time identifying all of the necessary stakeholders (including risk management and compliance). Do enough work up front to ensure you are implementing the most important stories in the first Sprint. Identify dependencies with other teams and clarify business objectives to aid in appropriate prioritization. 4

5 9. Make Other Groups First-Class Citizens You need to consider the needs of your entire enterprise team and treat them as first-class citizens. As you adopt Agile, be sure to remember Agile has an intense focus on the team. Agile s focus can be to the detriment of other business functions when applied poorly within an enterprise. You need to integrate the extended team and elevate all business functions to be first-class citizens in the new Agile approach. Some of these other functions can include: Legal, Finance, HR, and other groups possibly affected by the application under development Marketing, sales, support,training, and others involved in exposing and transitioning the application to the user community Operations, support and others involved in maintenance Applying Blueprint for Enterprise Agile Blueprint makes it easy for you to embrace Enterprise Agile. This ease comes because Blueprint is designed to aid Business Analysts and Product Owners through the application development process. With Blueprint, you can easily apply the following to Agile practices: Adapt Strengths Of Traditional Processes. Blueprint enables you to create a hybrid process as needed so that you can use the strengths of traditional processes at the same time you re applying Enterprise Agile. Prioritize Work Blueprint also makes it easy for you to prioritize work because Blueprint enables you to see clearly the relationships between different pieces of your application. Maintain A Single Platform For Requirements Modeling. Blueprint allows you to build a single requirements modeling environment for your enterprise consisting of Agile projects, projects transitioning to Agile, and traditional projects that share common compliance and other requirements. Communicate To Different Audiences By incorporating a number of different types of reporting, Blueprint makes it easy to communicate with a broad range of stakeholders by providing them exactly the information they need at the right level of abstraction. Build The Right System Blueprint makes it easy to run simulations so that everyone can see how your application will function. This visibility means that building the proper system that handles all of your requirements is far more likely. 5

6 Seamlessly Integrate With Popular Agile Alm Solutions. Blueprint integrates with products like Rally, VersionOne, JIRA, and Microsoft TFS, to effectively add a powerful RDM platform that s fully integrated with the Agile team s development environment. 90 Eglinton Ave E #700 Toronto, ON M4P 2Y3, Canada BLUE(2583) Blueprint provides an industry-leading software solution that helps large organizations build better business and software applications. Enterprises across the globe use Blueprint to ensure regulatory compliance, speed transition to Agile, better align Business and IT and leverage seamless integration with leading ALM technologies. Nearly half of all Fortune 100 companies choose Blueprint to de-risk and accelerate their software projects Blueprint Software, Inc. All rights reserved. All product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners. BP Mar