More Effective Requirements

Learn how can you have more effective requirements in your organization. Let our experience with hundreds of organizations illuminate the path for your team.

Customize course

About More Effective Requirements

  Duration: 1.5 – 3 day course
  Resources: Workbook

Agile development shifts traditional requirements work to a “just in time” approach. How does this affect good requirements practices?

This course explains agile approaches to traditional requirements sources including MRDs, PRDs, feature lists, and user scenarios. It dives into techniques for developing requirements on Agile projects, including the Agile Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), using story mapping to define the scope of the project, writing user stories, sizing stories (agile estimation), and developing acceptance criteria for user stories.

Concepts are illustrated through extensive use of hands-on labs.

Typical Course Outline

What Are We Trying to Build?

  • It all starts with the Product Vision
  • Characteristics of good Product Visions

Software Requirements: What and Why

  • What is a requirement?
  • The Product Vision as the top-level requirement
  • Three purposes of requirements
  • Using requirements to manage risk
  • Product versus project requirements
  • Potentiallly useful requirements artifacts
  • Working software as the ultimate requirements specification

Initial requirements gathering

  • Envisioning the high level requirements
  • What can I do with it: high-level user stories and story mapping
  • How it works: business rules and the domain model
  • How it looks: low-fidelity UI models and workflows

Just-in-time Requirements Elaboration

  • No requirement before its time: the concept of the last responsible moment
  • Requirements elaboration during iteration planning

Requirements Change Management & Requirements Validation

  • Acceptance criteria
  • The Definition of Done and why it matters

  • Software Requirements: What and Why
  • Initial Requirements Gathering
  • Just-in-Time Requirements Elaboration
  • Requirements Change Management
  • Requirements Validation

This course is designed for:

  • Developers
  • Scrum Masters
  • Product Owners / Managers
  • Business/Requirements Analysts
  • Technical Leads
  • Test Leads
  • Designers
  • Architects

We offer our courses online, privately at our training facility in Seattle, or at your location.

Customize this course

Your team has unique challenges. Learn about the ways we can customize this course to fit your needs.

“Don’t let ineffective requirements hold your team back. Learn how the most effective organizations approach requirements from our extensive experience working with clients around the world. We’ll customize this course to help your team go from good to great.”

Steve McConnell, Author of More Effective Agile