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Thursday, November 14, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm
Agile Requirements
AT6

Speed Grooming Requirements with SAFe

Want your sprint/iteration planning to take less than fifteen minutes (excluding tasking)? The key is in the story writing we do during backlog grooming. Although the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has little to say about story writing, this "speed grooming" practice makes iteration planning a breeze, and better software comes out of the process. André Dhondt shares stories of real-world agile teams using this technique and how they've moved to a customer-empathy mindset. How does it work? You need to develop great stories—customer-focused, just barely enough detail, in thin vertical slices, and collectively designed. André reviews story writing and describes how to do the three phases of grooming in under one team-hour a week (typically, two 25-minute meetings) by defining the phases—Exploring, Sizing, and Splitting, plus one off-line activity Naming the Universe. Learn to avoid the overhead of long pre-backlog sessions, reduce Product Owner prep time, and prevent hidden dependencies from bumping a story out to the next iteration.

André Dhondt, Rally Software Development

For more than a decade, André Dhondt has led agile adoptions, providing guidance to teams and organizations seeking shorter development cycles, higher quality, and more effective discovery of customer value. In various roles including developer, manager, product owner, and scrum master, André has done everything from hiring and building teams in startup environments to coaching teams for an organization with more than 100,000 employees. Some of his teams have seen cycle time reduced by half, practically bug-free code with daily deployments, and improved employee morale.

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