July Workshop: Rapid Requirements Gathering

[ncancelliere]

Saturday, July 18th, from 9am to noon at the Austin Community College
(Highland Campus), we'll be hosting another workshop. Details are
below.

Please make sure you are able to attend this session. Seating is
limited and on a first-come, first-served basis. We want to give
everyone the opportunity to attend, so please only sign-up if you are
committed to attending. (These sessions are valuable to both newbies
and experienced alike).

Visit the URL below for more details and to sign up:

http://rapidrequirements.eventbrite.com/


Rapid Requirements Gathering Workshop

Gathering requirements is one of the first steps of project
definition. Success or failure at this task usually sets the tone for
the remainder of the project. Mistakes during the requirements
collection phase can, at best, delay a product’s introduction and, at
worst, result in catastrophic product failures. Yet, traditional
requirements gathering is typically a black art of meetings, rounds of
interviews, discussions with customers, and a large dose of gut
instinct. Isn’t there a better way?

Rapid Requirements Gathering (RRG) offers an alternative to
traditional approaches. An RRG exercise is a specific type of phased
meeting that is designed to quickly elucidate requirements from a
diverse collection of stakeholders. It takes the experiential base of
all of its participants and, in a facilitated process, produces a rank
ordered set of requirements that can guide product development. It is
well suited to help identify and order user stories in agile project
backlogs.

An RRG exercise offers several advantages over traditional information
gathering meetings. It easily scales from six to thirty people. It
is massively parallel. It is fun and highly chaotic. Little to no
preparation is required. It has built-in anonymity and it very
quickly returns high quality results.

The workshop will consist of a quick review of the process followed by
a participative exercise.

Scott Killen’s Bio

Scott Killen is founder and President of Agile Austin and the Agile
Practice Leader at PayPal. He is a Certified ScrumMaster and
Certified Scrum Practitioner through the Scrum Alliance and a
Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) through the Project
Management Institute. He is co-instructor for an IT Project Management
class as well as an Agile Project Leadership class at Austin Community
College. He is a past President of the Austin Software Process
Improvement Network, past Chair of the Austin PMI Technical Local
Interest Group, and in 1997 he was awarded a CSQE from the American
Society for Quality.


Sponsors
When you arrive for the workshop, refreshments will be present. Agile
Austin wishes to thank Rally Software and Austin Community College for
their continued support of our community.