Agile 2009 - planning

Painless Iteration Planning

chicjulie — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 04:32:38 +0000

Plan an iteration - sounds pretty easy right? It can be easy using a well defined framework. This sessions will cover the following:

Owner or facilitator of the meeting
When to hold the meeting
Whom to invite
Materials - please note that this session is not tool specific other than Sharpies and Sticky Notes! But the plan can be input into your tool of choice.
Purpose
Agenda
Planning Data - what to bring to the planning meeting
Output & Deliverables - All contribute to the iteration planning meeting

A handout will be provided for future reference.

Agile Infrastructure

littleidea — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 11:02:21 +0000

Deploying to servers has replaced shrinkwrapping CDs for delivering software. In the internet enabled era, the application is the infrastructure.

The basis of all Agile engineering practices is reproducibly building from source code. If software is delivered on servers, and those servers can’t be reproducibly deployed from bare metal to working services, how Agile can you be?

Continuous Integration is great, but what about Continuous Delivery! What are you waiting for?

This talk will outline innovations in tools, process, planning and culture emerging at the front lines.

Release Planning (The Small Card Game): Discover What Works

Chet_Hendrickson — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:22:40 +0000

This tutorial, the “small card game”, is a simulation game introducing the concepts of Agile planning, story value, and story cost. Learn to manage scope and optimize return on investment. The students practice planning a project with varying levels of information about the features needed, and experience how “nature” deals with their plan. Again, very appropriate for all team members, in-house customers, marketing, and management, to learn how the process works and what their part in it is.

An Introduction to Agile Estimating and Planning

mikecohn — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 02:36:18 +0000

Planning is important, even for agile projects. Too many teams view planning as something to be avoided and too many organizations view plans as something to hold against their development teams. In this session you will learn how to break that cycle by learning and practicing skills that will help create useful plans that lead to reliable decision-making. You will learn about story points, ideal days, and how to estimate with “Planning Poker.” Both short-term iteration and long-term release planning will be covered.

Diagrams for understanding and improving Agile practice

bonniea — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:13:01 +0000

This talk focuses around a series of diagrams that help explain how various practices work.

Many practices work to different degrees of success depending on exactly how they’re implemented. We’ll discuss why this is so, with examples of multiple ways to do pair programming, testing, and planning. Along the way, we’ll show some new work: how to get a better plan by not estimating, models to identify which practices to experiment on, and how to find what to vary.

Each concept will be explained with diagrams that get to the gist of the practice - and methods of thinking about variations.

From Concept to Product Backlog - What Happens Before Iteration 0?

gmkayaker — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 05:57:15 +0000

Many agile methodologies assume a customer (or product owner) walks into the room with a swack of money and a pile of story cards and tells the development team to start building the functionality described on the top few cards. This tutorial provides an overview of what needs to go on “behind the scenes” between when a project is conceived and when development can start in earnest. It identifies the artifacts that may need to be produced, whether and when they should be produced, which activities can be used to produce them and who should be involved in those activities.

Using the Agile Testing Quadrants to Plan Your Testing Efforts

janet_gregory — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:54:52 +0000

Different testing approaches are needed because quality has many aspects besides functional requirements, such as making sure the code is reliable and secure. How do you know you’ve done the kinds of testing and quality processes are necessary for your product, especially on an agile project?

The Agile Testing Quadrants help you categorize tests and plan for different testing activities needed over the life of a project. It can be used by the team as a base for this common vocabulary about testing, and as a mechanism to start discussions and encourage collaboration.

Death by Scrum Meeting

petebehrens — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 06:11:25 +0000

There is no better way to gauge an organization’s culture than to watch its meetings - usually dull and lifeless. Meetings are often cited as one of the most wasteful activities in business - yet Scrum demands more meetings more often. Engineers find themselves micro-managed with little time left to get “real” work done. This session provides leaders a whole new perspective and techniques for Scrum Meetings in building high-performing disciplined teams through focused, active, engaged, visual and time-boxed facilitation techniques to take teams from DOING Scrum to OWNING Scrum!

Agile Project Management—Innovation in Action

jimhighsmith — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:59:16 +0000

Agile Project Management (APM) addresses the challenges of embracing change, encouraging innovation, and delivering continuous customer value through a set of agile principles and practices.

The session will present the conceptual framework of agile methods, how agile processes are Envision-Evolve rather than Plan-Do, stories from agile projects both small and large (600 people) and from different domains such as software and medical instruments, and how the “flow” of an agile project differs from more traditionally managed projects.

Agile Grows up: The Agile Business Analyst

flybynight107 — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:53:22 +0000

The business analyst role seems conspicuously missing from most agile methods. Do agile methods make business analyst an obsolete role? Certainly not! But how do you integrate what is sometimes portrayed as a plodding and documentation driven role into an agile project? This tutorial provides participants practical guidance for how the business analyst integrates and collaborates with all members of the team. During this workshop the participant will learn how to construct and evolve an agile business analysis process that is appropriate for their specific project environment.