program selection system

User stories play a central role in Agile requirements, planning and implementation. However, experts have different formulas for crafting stories and teaching others how to do it.

In this session, Jennitta Andrea, Gil Broza, Mike Cohn and Ron Jefrries will share their unique, similar or different perspectives on such issues as:

• Format: Do stories have a typical format or does that just get in the way?
• Scope: What is / is not a User Story?
• Size: Does size matter?
• Splitting: What is it? Is it needed? If so, when?
• Authors: Who writes or changes User Stories?

Reasonably accurate estimation of user stories is necessary in order to provide the customer with development schedule predictability. Small stories are usually fairly easy to estimate, but estimates for larger stories are often accompanied by higher degrees of uncertainty. Although a large story may sometimes be broken down into smaller stories for purposes of estimation, this is not always the case.

This workshop proposes a method for enabling a team of developers to rapidly quantify the relative complexities of larger user stories by using “tests” as the unit of estimation.

Groups that are releasing their software to production one or more times per week are doing micro-releases.

Industrial Logic has been doing micro-releases of its Greatest Hits eLearning product (http://industriallogic.com/elearning) for a few years now.

Micro-releasing has simplified our process by eliminating traditional agile planning activities, such as

• estimating user stories
• reconciling estimates
• calculating velocity
• trying to obtain a consistent velocity

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.

Presentation Description

We offer the beginning of a unified theory of software development, deriving the practices that are necessary in order to do software profitably and well.

Starting from simple and commonly-held assumptions, we will explore the dynamic behavior of a software project, and will derive both management practices, and technical practices, as the inevitable consequences of iterative software delivery.

This course will use the release planning game to explore various project planning strategies. The game is played in small groups of approximately four players. Both programmers and customers may play, in any combination.

In each cycle of the game, the players plan and “implement” a product. Each time through, they learn some new lessons enabling them to plan and implement better next time. Scoring is based upon each team’s total return on investment

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to plan and conduct a series of agile workshops—product roadmap, release plan and iteration requirements workshops—to generate “just enough” requirements-related information at the right time and for the right stakeholder community on large agile projects. This interactive session features lecture, simulation, and discussion.

How do you quickly and effectively develop a healthy product backlog which you can use as a basis for iteration and release planning?

If planning for a large co-located 30+ development team is not enough to make you want to pull your hair out then try a 30+ development team located across several time zones, in places with different cultures and languages. Now, you’ve reached a level in the Agile planning game that would send most product owners running home to their mommies.