The primary tenant of agile is to deliver value to organizations, iteratively, using the most efficient techniques, just-in-time.
Many agile teams, especially those who choose the Scrum approach, choose user stories as their primary technique/tool for solution requirements, and they utilize dozens of other techniques, formally or informally, throughout the project lifecycle. Even traditional techniques like process models, context diagrams, business rules analysis and functional decomposition support the objectives of agile projects when they are done collaboratively.
All projects are different and we can modify traditional techniques to fit agile projects. The timing and level of detail might be different, but all effective and efficient techniques are welcome in agile projects. The right techniques are the ones that promote dialog and conversation within the team.
Kick up the collaboration What do traditional techniques look like in an agile environment? In many cases, they look informal but highly collaborative:
- Instead of modeling in Visio, we draw context and process diagrams as a team on whiteboards.
- We use prioritization techniques and collaborative games to inspire engaging conversation with ALL team members.
- We gather input from all stakeholders before and after every iteration as we continuously refine business needs and business rules.
- We decompose epics into user stories and then into acceptance criteria using a visual display of post-its or notecards.
Agile projects may run far away from giant BRDs, but we still need to consider business rules, risk, prioritization, constraints, dependency, non-functional requirements, etc. We need to manage change and traceability.
Agile projects require more than just user stories. Like any successful project, they require variety of techniques applied effectively to deliver value to stakeholders and users. The agile value is NOT in documentation and documented results of the technique, but rather the collaborative execution and resulting dialog.