EXIN BCS Professional Certificate in Agile Business Analysis – Including Exam

This certification is relevant for anyone wishing to understand the Agile approach from a business perspective. This includes business architects, business analysts, project managers and business managers.

You’ll gain a broad understanding of business analysis, including:

• How to describe a range of agile methods (process, roles, principles)
• The role of business analysis in an agile team
• The use of agile analysis, modelling and documentation techniques
• How to analyse business goals and their decomposition
• How to evaluate whether an agile method is appropriate for a given situation
• Understanding how to apply user story techniques
• How to explain the techniques used to plan and manage an iteration

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

• There are no entry requirements for this certification.

What format is the exam?

• 90 minute 'closed book' with 40 multiple choice questions. Please note: this exam has been updated to an online format. The new syllabus reflects a change in exam format only, syllabus content has not changed.
• Pass mark is 65% (26/40)