Learning Outcomes

• Understand how increments and iterations are defined.
• Appreciate the benefits of delivering early and often:
  • financial, marketing, engineering and other.
• Identify examples of where incremental delivery is used as a successful business model.
• Begin to break projects into increments through:
  • developing a mindset to split dependencies and ideas
  • using different prisms to split ideas: value, risk, stakeholder, urgency, geography, necessity.
• Know how small to go with your increment.
• Be able to map a customer journey or story strand to create slices or bites of functionality.
• Put in place practices that enable delivering early and often.
• Balance potential drawbacks or limits to delivering early and often including transaction cost and technological break-through.
• Demonstrate the value of incremental delivery.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the importance of feedback and how it helps us.
• Appreciate natural problems we have in using feedback.
• Understand the structure of feedback loops within the software development cycle.
• Set up nested feedback loops within each part of the development process to improve responsiveness, customer satisfaction and quality as well as reducing risk.
• Evaluate the cost of feedback.
• Realize how to separate valuable feedback signals from environmental ‘noise’.
• Apply feedback cycles to team and process, as well as the project, using Retrospectives.
• Identify key reasons why feedback can be misused or ignored.

Learning Outcomes

• Appreciate why time is so important to an organization and why the customer’s view of time matters.
• Consider the benefits and limitations of the ‘on time’ delivery approach adopted by most companies.
• Take a broader view of end to end flow.
• Analyze the cost of delay in development projects.
• Appreciate the opportunity offered by flow optimization to eliminate delay and increase delivery speed.
• Judge how to optimize flow at scale.

Learning Outcomes

• Appreciate the key principles, practices and roles within Scrum.
• Understand the key advantages and benefits the framework is intended to enable.
• Identify common points of failure or difficulty and prepare your organisation for a successful implementation of Scrum.
• Deal with problems that often arise.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the practices and principles of the Kanban Method.
• Visualize your work.
• Decide how you might limit your WIP.
• Take measurements of the workflow and manage the results.
• Communicate work standards using explicit process policies.
• Understand how to implement feedback loops.
• Attempt to improve collaboratively using models.
• Recognize improvement opportunities using models.
• Understand how to use classes of service.
• Differentiate between input and delivery cadence.
• Distinguish where and how to implement Queue Replenishment Meetings, Improvement Katas and Operations Review Meetings.
• Experiment with the ideas of evolutionary change and how to overlay the principles with existing processes.
• Analyze your progress of improvement.

Learning Outcomes

• Identify the common compromises made with Agile implementation.
• Understand the likely impact of compromise on expected benefits.
• Recognize the potential to adapt elements of Agile methods.
• Examine whether adaptation is truly necessary.
• Recognize the common ground between different Agile methods.
• Appreciate the underlying practices and principles that should remain constant.
• Differentiate which elements of Agile are more superficial and can be modified.
• Recognize the challenges and obstacles likely to arise when implementing the principles.
• Understand the feedback cycle of implementation: select, do, learn, adapt.
• Choose the most appropriate practices to begin with, depending upon your business need.

Learning Outcomes

• Identify how the term requirement is used in projects today.
• Explore problems caused by the conventional approach to requirements, particularly the impact of separating design from delivery.
• Appreciate the consequences of seeing requirements as information.
• Judge how Agile practices differ in their conception of a requirement.
• Understand and apply differing techniques for working with requirements. Select when each is most appropriate and appraise their advantages and disadvantages:
  • User stories
  • Decomposition
  • Feature injection
  • Critical requirements
  • Elaboration
  • Story mapping
  • Confirmation including acceptance criteria and specification by example
  • Supplementary tools including Agile modelling and use cases
• Recognize the importance of non-functional requirements. Discriminate when they are used improperly and distinguish how to use them better in the context of your project.

Learning Outcomes

• Appreciate the importance of decreasing cycle time.
• Comprehend a model regarding flow choices.
• Decide where your organization currently sits within the model.
• See the attraction, and pitfalls of ‘certainty’ in delivery.
• Appreciate the value of throughput and the likely combination of tools which will optimize for it.
• Appreciate the value of flexibility and the likely combination of tools which will optimize for it.
• Appreciate the value of all out speed and the likely combination of tools which will optimize for it.
• Consider when certainty might be the correct choice and the likely combination of tools which will optimize for it.

The VFQ Technique Library consists of more than 30 quick-glance cards covering the most important Agile practices. Each technique card features step-by-step guidance, practical tips, and information on additional resources.

The library includes:

• Measuring Lead Time
• 5 Whys
• Acceptance Criteria
• Build-Measure-Learn
• Burndown Charts
• Classes of Service
• Cost of Delay
• Velocity
• User Stories