Scrum is great for getting teams to deliver good quality software regularly, but that doesn't really help if you are building the wrong thing! The Product Backlog is a key artefact to helping steer the team in the right direction. Yet sometimes the Product Backlog is just a long list of tickets logged by the business. Often Product Owners can't see the forest for the trees. There are so many items in their backlog that the team have no idea what direction the product is actually headed. Even if you know what your backlog should look like, finding the time to get it in order seems impossible.

If this sounds familiar, this book is for you. We have worked with a number of business analysts and Product Owners who feel the same way. We found that sending Product Owners on two day theoretical training courses is not the answer. Instead we run short workshops where we work with the Product Owner's actual backlog. The workshop is a working session, and an hour later the Product Owners emerge with an improved backlog.

We have combined a number of these workshops into this book. We provide all our workshop plans, tips for facilitation, and teaching points to cover for each topic. You can use these workshops to help the Product Owners you work with to master their backlogs.

If a team believes they are agile, but nothing has changed about the way they test, then there is still much to learn. We teach 5 key principles that explain why agile testing is fundamentally different to traditional testing.

This books includes a collection of workshops to help teams grasp these principles and adopt an agile testing mindset. It's not just for testers. A key part of agile testing is that the whole team is involved, so we always run these workshops with everyone in the team. 

If your team is ready for the next level we highly recommend running through the workshops in this book, it will teach them a number of simple but valuable techniques to help prevent bugs and dramatically increase the quality of your products. We provide the facilitation plans, teaching points, and even the slides you might use to help you run the workshop.

We often hear people say "We're agile, we don't need a plan" or even worse "We can't plan". This is just not true. Release Planning in agile is as important as it is in traditional projects, the only difference is there are a few techniques that help make sure the plans bear some relation to reality. We've all worked on projects where you know from day one that you will be late, and yet no one does anything about it. Agile planning is different. We give up the illusion of control of traditional rigid plans, and replace it with a clear view of where we actually are, even if it's badly behind schedule, so that we can make decisions based on what is actually possible.

We have run Release Planning workshops with many organisations. Sometimes starting with C-level executives to set the direction and vision for a product suite; other times starting with teams and making sense of what they are currently working on. This book is a collection of our workshops that will help you run similar workshops to create agile Release Plans. We include teaching points on a range of techniques like Story Mapping and Release Burnups to help you explain to other's how to use these methods effectively.

Have you ever looked at a requirement document that’s 50 plus pages long and wondered if there was an easier way to communicate? Or have you ever received a 1 liner story without any context and thought “huh?”.

We have and in our years of work in traditional waterfall organisations and newer agile organisations the trend continues. Very seldom is the sweet spot in the middle achieved. In every single case the path to the sweet spot started with conversations.

Over the last 3 years we have developed a number of workshops to help people start these conversation. The workshops are aimed at different stakeholders ranging from business people, to Product Owners and teams. This book is a collection of some of those workshops and can be used to help improve the way you think about and communicate agile requirements. 

Although we talk about Product Owners, this book isn't just for Scrum teams. You can apply most of the lessons in here to any project you are on. We have used these techniques and ideas for renovating houses, redesigning websites and even writing this book!