An Agile Approach to Defining and Estimating Requirements

Workshop Objective: In this experiential workshop, you will learn to define requirements in the form of user stories, rank them, and estimate them. We will simulate a real agile project by working through the feedback loops of breaking down requirements into smaller chunks and reranking based on estimated size. You will practice developing and managing a product backlog, as well as practicing committing to an iteration’s set of stories.

Workshop Overview: Defining and managing requirements is not easy, even in agile projects. In this workshop, we will use the format of a user story (from epics to themes to stories) to define requirements and walk through the ranking and gross estimation process. We will then proceed through iteration planning where we take the gross estimation and refine it, work through an iteration, and see what we finished. Then, the product owner will rerank the requirements, and the team will work through the requirements again. We will refine what the user stories look like, how you estimate them, and how to measure what you can accomplish in an iteration.

Target Audience: Anyone on an agile team: Product owners, product managers, technical leaders, project managers, Scrum masters, technical staff.

Prerequisites: None.

Workshop Duration: 2 days

Workshop Outline:

1. Introduction
   1. Objectives
   2. Define requirements: epics, themes, stories
2. Writing user stories
   1. We’ll work through a project where you will break the requirements into user stories. You’ll write epics where you can’t create a user story.
   2. You’ll organize the user stories for an iteration into themes that make sense (what to do for an iteration)
3. Estimating user stories
   1. Separate size from duration
   2. T-shirt sizes, Fibonacci series
   3. You’ll perform a gross estimate on all the user stories you have, in whatever shape they are.
4. Ranking the product backlog
   1. The Product Owner will rank the product backlog. We will discuss use the ideas of business value and pairwise comparison and other approaches for ranking.
   2. Discuss common problems such as multiple backlogs
5. During an iteration
   1. How the team manages the iteration’s backlog
   2. How the product owner manages the product backlog: grooming the backlog, gross estimation
   3. We will keep practicing with the initial project until that project is complete
6. Project 2: Define requirements and manage them during the project’s iterations.
   1. If we have time, or if you want to make time, we can define requirements for your project and estimate them. Then, we’ll do at least one pass through the backlog.
7. Summary and wrap-up