The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning From Strategic Plan to Detailed Requirements

Complete Agile Roadmap for Analyzing Customer Needs and Planning Product Development

"This book will become a staple reference that both product owners and business analysis practitioners should have
by their side."
-- From the Foreword by Alain Arseneault, former IIBA Acting President & CEO

"[This book] is well organized in bite-sized chunks and structured for ready access to the essential concepts, terms, and practices that can help any agile team be more successful."
-- Karl Wiegers

The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning presents clear, actionable guidance for every product owner, product and program manager, business analyst, requirements engineer, and project manager seeking to improve agile analysis and planning. Renowned author and consultant Howard Podeswa teaches best practices drawn from agile and agile-adjacent frameworks, including ATDD, BDD, DevOps, CI/CD, Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, XP, Lean Thinking, Lean Startup, Circumstance-Based Market Segmentation, and theories of disruptive innovation. He offers a comprehensive agile roadmap for analyzing customer needs and planning product development, including discussion of legacy business analysis tools that still offer immense value to agile teams.

Using a running case study, Podeswa walks through the full agile product lifecycle, from visioning through release and continuous value delivery. You learn how to carry out agile analysis and planning responsibilities more effectively, using tools such as Kano analysis, minimum viable products (MVPs), minimum marketable features (MMFs), story maps, product roadmaps, customer journey mapping, value stream mapping, spikes, and the definition of ready (DoR). Podeswa presents each technique in context: what you need to know and when to apply each tool. Read this book to

• Master principles, frameworks, concepts, and practices of agile analysis and planning in order to maximize value delivery throughout the product's lifecycle
• Explore planning and analysis for short-term, long-term, and scaled agile initiatives using MVPs and data-informed learning to test hypotheses and find high-value features
• Split features into MMFs and small stories that deliver significant value and enable quick wins
• Refine, estimate, and specify features, stories, and their acceptance criteria, following ATDD/BDD guidance
• Address the unique analysis and planning challenges of scaled agile organizations
• Implement 13 practices for optimizing enterprise agility

Supported by 175+ tools, techniques, examples, diagrams, templates, checklists, and other job aids, this book is a complete toolkit for every practitioner. Whatever your role, you'll find indispensable guidance on agile planning and analysis responsibilities so you can help your organization respond more nimbly to a fast-changing environment.

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Howard Podeswa is an established author and sought-after speaker at Business Analysis conferences. He plays a leading role in the industry (Business Analysis), as designer of BA training programs for a number of large training institutions (Boston University, TriOS, Humber College, etc.), Subject Matter Expert for the NITAS BA program (co-sponsored by US Dept. of Labor and CompTIA), and reviewer of the profession's standard book of best practices (the BABOK, owned by the International Institute of Business Analysis). Podeswa, through his role as Director for Noble Inc., has provided BA services internationally to a diverse client base, including the Canadian military (MASIS), the U.S. nuclear industry and the insurance and finance sectors. He is the author of The Business Analyst's Handbook (Cengage, 2009) and both editions of UML for the IT Business Analyst (Cengage, 2005 and 2009).

Preface
1. Overview of Agile Business Analysis
2. Release Plan Preparation (Sprint 0) Part 1: LeanStartup Techniques
3. Release Plan Preparation Part 2: Analyzing the Impact on the Business; Discovering Features
4. Release Plan Preparation Part 3: BA Tools for Decomposing Features and Epics
5. Release Plan Preparation Part 4: Creating and Tracing Initial Set of User Stories
6. Sprint n - Business Analysis during the Implementation Sprint
7. Sprint n - Analyzing Business Rules
8. BA Tasks and Tools for Grooming the Product Backlog
9. Endings - The BA Function in Iteration/Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective and Release Retrospective
10. Scaling the Business Analysis Function on Large Projects