In Chapter 1: What Is Agile?, you will build an understanding of Agile and Agile project management so you are able to explain Agile to others. This chapter includes defining Agile and presenting the Agile Manifesto and its 12 principles. You will be introduced to the multiple frameworks under the Agile umbrella, including Scrum, the most popular framework, Scrum values, Scrum's three roles, three Artifacts, and five activities. You may even gain a thirst to obtain one of the Scrum certifications. You will also learn about using “recipes” for your Agile audit journey and explain how you can use the recipes provided in this book. You will find the Agile Manifesto, Agile frameworks, and recipe concepts to create your Agile methodology.
In Chapter 2: What Is Audit?, you will learn how to define an audit, describe the different types of audits, and list the professional standards for the different types of audits. This chapter clarifies the audit project life cycle activities and use of audit customers and audit stakeholders. You will obtain brief overviews of auditors' key knowledge areas, including governance, risk, control, finance/accounting, technology, and compliance and skills needed as a successful auditor. The brevity of the discussion of the knowledge and skills is necessary, as each can be a separate book. After reading this chapter, you will be able to explain auditing, audit customers, knowledge and skills needed to be an effective auditor, traditional audit project life cycle phases, and problems encountered in the audit process that contribute to delivery risks to interested parties. This chapter includes a recipe for building auditor knowledge and skills.
In Chapter 3: Traditional Audit Engagement Process and Practices, you will obtain information on tasks and activities in the traditional audit life cycle. Many of these activities were collected from work experiences and reviews of other audit methodologies and represent typical audit practices. Your specific traditional audit practices may vary, but you should see some similarities as well. This chapter helps you further understand the typical activities to complete audits in the traditional waterfall process and can be used to benchmark your current auditing practices. You will likely see the bottlenecks, redundancies, and inefficiencies created in the audit process and think of your Agile solutions as you read this chapter.
From Chapter 4: What Is Agile Audit? and Chapter 5: Why Agile Audit?, you will be able to describe what Agile auditing is and why it is beneficial to auditors and the organizations they serve. You will be introduced to the Agile audit framework and implementation options. You will discover some of the challenges encountered, the benefits of Agile, and how to get others to buy in to your Agile auditing methodology.
Chapter 6: Creating the Agile Mindset will help you develop a deeper understanding of Agile and the Agile mindset. You will also learn ways to assess if your auditors believe in your Agile Manifesto and discover ways to assess how strongly they feel about their ability to start an Agile process. This chapter also provides a recipe for how you can get your auditors to believe in your Agile Manifesto.
Part II: Implementing Agile Auditing provides ideas for and examples of techniques, methods, and practices for implementing Agile auditing and consists of the following five chapters:
In Chapter 7: Implementing Agile Auditing: Deciding Your Approach and Your Agile Audit Project Roles, you will learn about three different Agile strategies you can use for the implementation of Agile auditing, including full Agile, pilot Agile, and Agile lite. We will also cover Agile audit roles and responsibilities. In this chapter, you will discover challenges you can expect people to encounter as you implement your Agile audit methodology.
In Chapter 8: Implementing Agile Auditing: The Audit Planning Process, you will see a contrast of traditional annual audit planning using an audit universe and Agile audit planning using a risk universe. This chapter discusses three unconventional risk assessment methods: dynamic risk assessments, data‐driven risk assessments, and risk universe prioritizations. In this chapter, you will also learn more technical Agile jargon in the audit context. This chapter includes two recipes for helping you prioritize and select your user stories, depending on your selected approach to implementing Agile auditing.
Chapter 9: Implementing Agile Auditing: Planning Agile Audit Engagements explains how to plan your Agile audit resources with self‐managing teams. Further, you will review the Agile planning steps and discuss other Agile jargon specifically for planning activities. You will also learn how you can solve problems encountered during the engagement planning process with Agile auditing.
Chapter 10: Implementing Agile Auditing: Executing the Agile Audit includes discussing “testing with the audit client” during the execution phase. This chapter will explore workpaper documentation in an Agile audit environment and ideas on managing scope creep. Further, this chapter also discusses how audit findings are communicated in Agile auditing. You will explore and consider the different ways in which you can solve problems encountered during engagement execution or fieldwork process with Agile auditing.
In Chapter 11: Implementing Agile Auditing: Communicating Agile Audit Results, you will read of innovative means of communicating your audit results and will learn the different communicating activities that derive from Scrum, though applied to Agile auditing. You will have the opportunity to consider whether, with Agile auditing, you still need to write a formal report. You will review problems and explore the different ways you can solve problems encountered during the engagement communication process with Agile auditing.
Part III: Special Considerations provides valuable information regarding how new technologies are affecting the way we audit. You will explore using Learn and Kanban for Agile auditing. You will learn how to stop creating kitchen‐sink audits, merging risk‐based auditing and integrated auditing with Agile auditing. Part III consists of the following eight chapters:
Chapter 12: Agile Auditing in the “New Normal” Environment (Remote Auditing) presents in a thought‐provoking fashion how Agile audit in the “new normal” must adopt and embrace disruptive technologies (robotics process automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence) to be prepared to deal with global changes including the 2020–2021 COVID‐19 global pandemic. You will explore how existing technologies, such as videoconferencing and data analytics (DA), change the way we communicate and perform our audits. Also, you will examine techniques for effective virtual conferencing. This chapter provides an introduction to DA terminology and a synopsis of the DA process. You can consider using it as your recipe for starting your DA journey. This chapter examines some of the differences between these technologies and how they affect the way we work.
In Chapter 13: Lean and Agile Auditing, and Chapter 14: Exploring Kanban Agile Auditing, you will learn how to use these two frameworks with the Agile auditing framework. It is important to note that these are not mutually exclusive, and audit teams may find a merger of frameworks most beneficial.
In Chapter
