In this Agile Foundation course, we will start with an interactive presentation of agile benefits. Participants are encouraged to share their pre-agile experiences of what works and where challenges are encountered. This leads us into exploring agile principles and benefits of adopting agile.

We move on to explore the agile lifecycle and how team roles interact in the meetings that bind this cycle together (planning, daily stand-up, showcase, and retrospective). Next, we dive into specifics of story-test driven development: working through how user stories drive automated testing, and how continuous integration contributes to iterative releases.

Now the participants of this Agile Foundation course get an opportunity to apply what they learned. We form teams to plan and execute the first two iterations of a small construction project using lego. This helps the participants understand how to plan with user stories, estimate and track progress with velocity and where refactoring becomes important. Lessons learned from the exercise are explored by taking the teams through a retrospective. The day closes with a roundtable discussion to address any outstanding questions. Participants who have some experience of Agile practices will be encouraged to share this with their colleagues.

Agile Benefits

• Explore agile roots and underlying values and principles

Agile Practices

• Team roles and responsibilities
• roles described to reflect planned implementation

Meetings that drive the lifecycle

• Release and Iteration Planning
• Daily Stand-up
• Showcase
• Retrospective

Story-test driven development

• User stories
• Story tests
• How test automation and continuous builds enable releases

Hands-on Exercise

• estimating
• tracking

Roundtable discussion

• Time for in-depth questions and sharing experiences