program selection system

Is your agile project buried under a mountain of user stories? As you add stories, does your vision of the product you’re building grow hazier? As story count increases, do business stakeholders become more frustrated with prioritization? Do you find it difficult to communicate the big picture of what your system does?

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?

Immerse yourself in agile planning! This highly-interactive session creates a real-world planning environment, complete with user stories, estimates, stakeholders, and tough planning trade-offs. As part of a team, you’ll compete to create the best product possible. The product? A tutorial on agile development… that our presenter will actually deliver. Just as in real agile planning, you’ll have to figure out what your fellow attendees want to hear about, how to make difficult trade-offs, and how to fit all of the possibilities into the limited time available.

Program Description:

Evidence is mounting that Agile adoption is finally mainstream, so what’s next?

This panel draws the discussion away from process and technology to focus on what we build, not just how we build it. Panelists discuss the important role of product innovation and debate philosophies about how to source innovation. The panel tackles questions like what role Agile plays in helping or hampering product innovation; should innovation come from designers, customers, or elsewhere; where does product design meet product innovation; and how do we deliver innovation?

For Info Tech, Inc., the transition to Agile practices three years ago lead to a change in the way we collaborate and contract with our long term, mostly government customers. Our evolution covered Time and Materials (T&M) contracts, a Hybrid of T&M and Fixed Price and most recently a Fixed Price, Fixed Scope, Fixed Schedule contract that supports Agile development. Our goal has been to meet our customer’s needs for predictable results while maintaining our commitment to agile practices.

Management loves the idea of metrics. Project teams, though, hate it: no one likes to be examined like a bug under a magnifying glass. It’s such a shame that this is the perception, because constructive metrics are a project team’s best defense against insanity. When well done, metrics practice is like the martial art of Aikido, which uses an opponents own energy and momentum - and in this case self-interest and responsibilities - to overcome them. This course explores constructive metrics at the release level that can be used as leading indicators.

When exploring possible IT solutions to business problems, one of the key questions that is typically asked is whether it makes more business sense to either build the solution entirely, buy an off-the-shelf package, or some combination. This decision can be just as time-consuming and cost intensive as the actual development itself. An opportunity exists to apply agile techniques in order to better focus the buy vs. build decision. In order to maximize business value, the buy vs. build process should make every effort to leverage the strengths of Agile.

Being a product owner is a difficult job. BT has been using product owner teams to manage the details of “what should be built”. These teams own the content and the breakdown of user story epics into user stories for delivery teams and act as proxy customers to those delivery teams. This experience report examines a project, implementing an up to 24Mbps service over the 21CN network, which was successful in applying the approach and concludes with some advice on how best to apply Product Owner Teams.

The first principle of Agile is to deliver value to the customer. Understanding Business Value better can often do more than anything else to make your efforts better. We need to improve our Business Value Engineering.

In this Discovery Session, we intend to look at the principles and values that underlie Business Value and its uses. And we will look at how we practice Business Value Engineering throughout the life of the effort. Expect challenges, not pat answers. This discussion will enable you to improve your Business Value Engineering.

Gathering and writing “User Stories” is always a challenging activity and interview skills are the primary factor that makes the activity effective. In this session, I propose a method for exploring “User Wish” — user’s vague ideas before shaping user stories — using semi-structured interview with mind maps. The former half of the session is an introduction of mind maping and how to use it in user story exploration. The latter half will be a demonstration and workshop of attendees.

• What is a Mind map and Why ?
• How Software Development Benefits from Using Mind Maps