I spent the most recent four weeks conferencing. I had a blast. Because I kept traveling, I nicknamed this series of conferences my “Northern Hemisphere Conference Tour.” I’ve posted the slides on slideshare.net. Oct 24-Oct 28, I was in Vancouver, BC at Much Ado About Agile 2011. I delivered a keynote entitled, “Where is Agile […]
Workshop Objective: Maybe your team has come to you with a request/demand to do “Agile.” But you can’t tell what you’ll get if they do. If you’ve become accustomed to the artifacts from a phase gate lifecycle (or even a strictly iterative or strictly incremental lifecycle), moving to iterative/incremental development is quite difficult. Not only is
Workshop Objective: If you’ve been reading the software engineering literature, you know that Agile is all the rage. But moving from a phase gate lifecycle (or even a strictly iterative or strictly incremental lifecycle) to iterative/incremental development is quite difficult. Not only is the project planning different from planning up front, but moving from technical practices
Workshop Objective: If you’re managing multiple concurrent projects or a series of releases, you’re managing programs. This workshop will help you learn multiple approaches to uniting your projects or keeping your series of releases on track using agile approaches. Workshop Overview: Program managers make the strategic decisions across the organization for the good of the total product.
Workshop Objective: If you’re dreading the next project—because you know it will be a disaster, or at the very least uncomfortable—it’s time to think about designing your next project. We’re accustomed to thinking about designing products or tests, but projects? Is it really possible to design a project? Yes. Lifecycles, those idealized approaches to organizing
Workshop Objective: This experiential workshop helps agile technical teams prepare, interview, and select candidates. This workshop prepares people who may have only been on one side of the interview as a candidate to effectively participate on an interviewing team and effectively evaluate candidates. This workshop specifically address the cultural issues and particulars of finding candidates who
Workshop Objective: This experiential workshop provides you with an understanding and options for how you might create a successful geographically distributed agile project. The topics we’ll address are how to plan and execute the work for a geographically distributed project. Workshop Overview: If you have teams all over the world trying to create a product together, you
So where does all of this get us with budgets and dates? In many ways, estimating project budgets or dates for agile projects turns out to be irrelevant. If you have a ranked backlog, and you finish features, you can always stop the project if you hit a particular date or cost. It does matter
In Part 3, you had some knowledge of the team’s velocity. This is the option of when you do not have knowledge of the team’s velocity, because this team has not worked together before, or has not worked on a project like this before. You are all coming in blind. Your Zeroth Best Bet: Wait
You have options for estimation, once you have met the preconditions. If you don’t have the feature set in a ranked order, you are in trouble. That’s because if you use any lifecycle other than an agile lifecycle, the feature order matters to your estimates, and the team will discuss the feature order in addition