EXIN BCS Professional Certificate in Agile Business Analysis – Including Exam (BABA)

1. Agile Philosophy

1.1 The Business Analysis Service Framework

1.2 Business agility

• • Definition of business agility
• • Four dimensions of business agility

1.3 The agile business analyst

• • Enabling business agility
• • Supporting agile software projects
• • Agile manifesto for business analysts

1.4 Growth and fixed mindsets

• • Definitions

2. Agile Principles

2.1 The three elements of agile delivery

• • Mindset
• • Practices
• • Methods

2.2 The Agile manifesto

2.3 The six core Agile values

• • Collaborative working
• • Self-managing teams: Tuckman & Jenson theory of group development
• • Continuous improvement and analysis: 
• • Kaizen
• • 8 Wastes of Lean (TIMWOODS)
• • PDSA
• • Iterative development and incremental delivery
• • Planning for and building in change
• • Doing the right thing and the thing right

3. Agile Methods

3.1 Key elements in agile methods

3.2 Agile methods

• • Scrum: three pillars of Scrum; the sprint; four key Scrum events; the Scrum team; three Scrum artefacts
• • XP: five rules of XP
• • DSDM/Agile PM: DSDM life cycle phases
• • SAFe: overview description

4. Working with stakeholders and roles

4.1 Stakeholder Engagement

• • The nature of stakeholders
• • The multi-skilled team

4.2 Stakeholder categories, roles and perspectives

• • Business/governance stakeholders: Project sponsor; Business Managers; ProjectManager; Programme Manager
• • Architecture domain stakeholders: Business Architect; Solution Architect;  Software/application Architect; Data Architect
• • Development team stakeholders: Domain Expert; End-user; Team Leader; Software Developer; Software Tester
• • External stakeholders: Customer; Supplier; Competitor; Regulator

5. Modelling the business context

5.1 Business analysis and the business context

5.2 The Cynefin framework

5.3 The Functional Model Map (FMM)

• • Three perspectives of the FMM
• • Areas of relevance for business analysts

5.4 Modelling the business system

• • POPIT™ model
• • Business activity models
• • Business use case models
• • Business epics

6. Goal decomposition and prioritisation

6.1 Goal and functional decomposition

6.2 Cockburn’s levels of goal

6.3 The importance of prioritisation

6.4 Prioritisation techniques

• • Kano
• • MoSCoW
• • WSJF

6.5 Prioritisation decomposition

7. Deciding the requirements approach

7.1 The Requirements Engineering framework: requirements slices

7.2 The Product Owner role

7.3 Techniques for elaborating requirements iteratively

7.4 Prototyping

• • The five prototyping dimensions
• • Types of prototype

7.5 Definition of ready and definition of done

8. Modelling roles, stories and scenarios

8.1 User research and analysis

8.2 User Roles

• • Identifying and documenting user roles
• • Analysing personas and misuse characters

8.3 Modelling the system context and scope

• • Context diagram
• • Use case diagram

8.4 User stories

• • INVEST
• • Hierarchy of user stories
• • Compound stories
• • Complex stories
• • The 3Cs

8.5 Techniques

• • Scenario analysis
• • Behaviour-driven development
• • Story mapping

9. Organising and estimating requirements

9.1 Types of requirements: Technical; General; Functional; Non-functional

9.2 The itemised backlogs

• • The solution backlog
• • The release backlog
• • The iteration backlog

9.3 Ordering the backlog

9.4 Documenting non-functional requirements

9.5 Hierarchy of use cases and user stories

9.6 Estimation techniques:

• • Wideband Delphi
• • Relative sizing
• • Planning poker

10. Planning and managing iterations

10.1 The iteration

10.2 Iterations and goals

10.3 Planning the iteration

• • Calculating team velocity

10.4 Techniques to manage the iteration:

• • Daily stand-ups
• • Agile boards
• • Burn down charts
• • Iteration reviews
• • Show and tell
• • Retrospectives