It’s Our Schedule, Let’s Manage It! (Backlogs & Burndowns as tools for Agile Project Planning)
Who owns your project’s schedule? If you did not include “I do” as a part of your answer, perhaps you weren’t thinking of the layers of project planning, recognizing that everyone has ownership at some layer. Backlogs and Burndowns are effective tools for agile software teams to manage what they own. This Tutorial will explain Backlogs and Burndowns, showing how they work on real projects, helping manage real situations. This is a practical session for Developers, Testers, Team Leads, Coaches, and Project Managers who own Release and Iteration Planning.
The first half of the tutorial is PowerPoint presentation of the concept - lecture-style but open to questions and directions from the audience. The second half will be more dynamic and interactive as we go through a quick example of using a backlog and a burndown on a semi-realistic project. I gave a similar version of this tutorial at last-year’s Agile conference, and found, not surprisingly, that the flow of the second half was driven very much by the questions and comments coming from the crowd. This made it very real and applicable to the situations that were relevant to the audience. Can I put a sales-pitch here? This is the kind of session I wanted when I was getting started with Agile, because it provides something that can be used. It’s not just a theoretical presentation, but one that provides a set of tools and concepts that can be applied to real projects. From the feedback I received last year, the attendees seemed to agree.