Workshop: Being Agile About System Qualities

1 day

In a sprint to deliver features, agile teams sometime overlook software qualities or "non-functional" requirements such as security, scalability, performance or reliability. This hands-on workshop introduces practical techniques that support the incremental definition and delivery of system qualities along with system functionality. You will learn techniques for identifying quality concerns and weaving quality-related work into your project, and options for making quality objectives visible and tangible. You will be introduced to architecture practices for explicitly addressing system qualities and experience writing failure/recovery as well as "happy path" scenarios.

Objectives
At the completion of this workshop attendees should be able to:

• Write and critique an agile quality scenario
• Understand how to specify measurable results
• Define and interpret landing zone criteria
• Participate or lead a workshop to identify quality concerns
• Understand how quality-related activities can fit into their agile process

 

Topics

1. Agile values and an agile quality mindset
2. How specifying, architecting, testing, and implementing system qualities can fit into your agile process
3. Techniques for addressing architecture risks and system quality concerns
   a. Adding quality concerns to a product roadmap
   b. Architecture spikes
   c. Alternatives for managing architecture and quality-related tasks
4. Specifying system quality requirements
   a. Simple quality scenario templates
   b. Specifying measurable results
   c. Agreeing on quality target values
   d. Adding quality-related acceptance criteria to user stories
5. Agile Landing Zones
   a. What is a landing zone and how it differs from acceptance criteria
   b. What makes a landing zone agile?
   c. Options for level of detail
6. Making Quality Visible: quality radiators and dashboards
7. Testing system qualities
   a. Defining simple quality indicator tests
   b. Two kinds of quality-scenario tests
   c. Failure / recovery testing
   d. Testing quality-related acceptance criteria

 

Prerequisites
Attendees should have some familiarity with agile development practices and an interest in non-functional (system quality) requirements and how they can incorporate work on them into their agile projects or programs.

Audience
Who should attend?

• Technical leaders and architects, QA leads and testers. Product owners and program managers who care about how to manage the delivery of system qualities along with system functionality.

Workshop Information
Approximately 50% of the workshop is short exercises, discussions, and project simulations; 50% short lectures. An optional project-specific workshop day can be added to address your team's specific system quality practices and concerns.

 

Materials
Each attendee will receive a workshop guidebook developed by Wirfs-Brock Associates that includes quality-scenario templates, examples, and workshop notes.

For additional information please contact us at training@wirfs-brock.com