BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile

Learning Objectives

This BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile leaves delegates more confident in five key areas:

The rationale and benefits of agile ways of working.
The agile manifesto and applying agile principles to real work.
The methods and approaches used by agile teams.
Agile roles and how they work together.
Agile techniques and practices.

Audience, pre-requisites and assumed knowledge

As an agile certification foundation-level course there is no assumed knowledge, and it works well with mixed classes of software developers and the business stakeholders that they might interact with. Typical attendees include:

Traditional engineering teams of software engineers, analysts and testers, who are planning to start using agile ways of working.
Established teams that are keen to review their working practices and improve their approach.
Project managers seeking to adapt to agile roles such as scrum master or product owner.
Established or prospective product owners and product managers.
Stakeholders or users of products who need a good working relationship with agile teams.

Delivered as a private class, the course is pitched at an appropriate level. For example, experienced teams can quickly re-establish the basics and then spend more time considering the detail of their approach.

Approach

We are a friendly team of practitioners and we like to provide a personal level of support, before, during and after the class:

Pre-course reading designed exposes questions and explored in class.
Contact details allowing delegates to ask questions to the trainer before and after the class.
Access to a comprehensive set of guidance after the course so that delegates apply what they’ve learnt.
Digital course effectiveness surveys with results sent out to delegates and sponsors straight after the class.

Course Content

What is Agile?

Agile arose from a need to get things done, increase productivity, and make things better. We’ll start by telling the story of how the principles pioneered at Toyota in the 1940s led to a revolution in software product delivery 50 years later. Delegates understand the intent and benefits and delegates equipped with a commercial case for how agility leads to better outcomes.

The agile principles, as expressed in the agile manifesto, are explained with modern, practical examples such as:

The interactions of teams through electronic ticketing systems
Overcoming the need for big up-front architecture and design
Increasing release frequency to establish effective feedback cycles
Adapting traditional processes to make change easier to implement

Approaches for Agile Teams

Delegates explore the nature of the work they need to get done and decide which agile framework is the best fit based on the following options:

Scrum, an agile framework optimised for delivering complex software products.
Kanban, a lean methodology used to help teams improve any kind of work.
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), an approach to organising large scale software delivery departments.
Extreme Programming, a highly disciplined and technical approach to delivering software.
Lean Startup and Lean Software Development, an approach to getting new product ideas to market.
DSDM Atern, a project-based approach to agile delivery.

Roles in Agile

We outline the roles common to all IT delivery scenarios, with discussion on how to make them effective and avoid typical dysfunctions.

The customer
The team
The Agile lead
The stakeholders

Agile Techniques and Practices

Delegates see a wide-range of agile delivery techniques including user stories, backlog refinement, relative sizing with story points and retrospectives. We explore adaptations for distributed teams with mitigations to common problems arising from teams spread across different locations and time zones.