Once in a while a new approach to developing and testing business software comes along that is so powerful, so effective and so natural a way to work for your team that you think, “It’s obvious, why didn’t I think of that!”
This practical workshop and exercise-based course will help you improve the definition and assurance of your software delivery and is relevant for both agile and structured development methods.
Business Story Method is an approach that ensures all stakeholders including executives, sponsors, product managers, developers, testers, operations staff and users will all contribute to the finished product.
Using techniques such as specification and example, project profiling, ubiquitous language and roles & personas, the method delivers trusted stories to help design and validate the requirements as well as providing a stable framework for development and quality assurance.
Independent of your development approach, Business Story method will help you:
Focus the whole project team on business goals
Overcome communication issues in silos in your organisation
Change the emphasis toward early testing of requirements
Use business stories to validate requirements, drive development and as a basis for tests
Adopt a lean approach and agile disciplines at a team level
Benefits of Attending:
The key benefits are increased business confidence in delivery and reduced cost of re-work.
In summary, the value of this course is to enable all project participants to communicate in the natural language of Business Stories:
Business analysts derive Business Stories from requirements to confirm they can be trusted.
Developers take the same stories and use them to help design their code and automatically test it
Test analysts take the same stories and add detail required for system and acceptance testing.
Course Overview:
Specifically, topics you will learn about include:
What is a business story and how is it structured
How business stories produce more accurate requirements, leading to reduced cost of change
Relationship of business stories to requirements & workflows
Using Roles and Personas
Using project profiling techniques to identify appropriate development & test approaches
Creating a Dictionary of common terminology for Glossary Terms, Data Items and Indexing
Using workflows to validate stories and create acceptance tests
How business stories fit into both Agile and Structured projects
Balancing scripted and exploratory testing
How business stories spawn manual and automated tests
How test activity can be re-distributed across the project life-cycle
This course is delivered in workshop format. Course materials include all slides, exercise questions and examples of completed exercises. To support the workshop exercises, you will use the GC Story Platform software as an example of tools support. You will also receive a copy of the Business Story Pocketbook.
Who Should Attend?
Anyone who writes and/ or reads requirements, develops software or tests in both structured and agile projects:
Project Managers
Change Managers
Business Analysts
Developers
Test Analysts
Product Owners
As an individual you can attend one of our public courses. In-house training is also available if you’d like your team to learn together.
Biographies of Tutors
This course is delivered by both Paul Gerrard and Susan Windsor.
Paul Gerrard is a consultant, teacher, author, webmaster, programmer, tester, conference speaker, rowing coach and publisher. He has conducted consulting assignments in all aspects of software testing and quality assurance, specialising in test assurance. He has presented keynote talks and tutorials at testing conferences across Europe, the USA, Australia, South Africa and occasionally won awards for them.
Educated at the universities of Oxford and Imperial College London, he is Principal of Gerrard Consulting Limited and is the host of the UK Test Management Forum.
Susan Windsor is a specialist in Assurance, especially in troubled projects. She has been responsible for the delivery of software solutions for many years, as a service provider and as IT Manager for a Global Oil Company.
From small niche solutions through to large multi-geography/supplier programmes she has delivered testing services and consultancy as a Director of a specialist Test Consultancy and as manager of IBM’s UK Testing Services business.
Susan has spoken at many industry conferences throughout Europe. She is a Principal of Gerrard Consulting and is the programme chair for the Test Management Forum.
