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Michael Mah

QSM Associates, Inc.

With twenty-five years of industry experience Michael Mah teaches, writes, and consults for QSM Associates to tech companies on measuring and estimating software projects for offshore, waterfall, and agile. Michael and his QSM partners have researched thousands of projects worldwide. His work examines time-pressure dynamics of teams and their contribution to project success and failure. Michael’s clients include Boeing, Progressive, Verizon Wireless, Nationwide, JPMorgan Chase, and other Fortune 100 companies. He is the director of the Benchmarking Practice at the Cutter Consortium in the United States. A private pilot, Michael lives in the mountains of western Massachusetts. Reach Michael at qsma.com.

Speaker Presentations
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 8:30am
Full-day Tutorials
Practical Agile Metrics for Release Planning, Estimation, and Retrospectives

How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve with agile practices with that of traditional waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah to learn about both agile and waterfall metrics and how these metrics behave in real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to create agile project trends on productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of agile measurement, showing you these metrics in action on retrospectives and release estimation and planning. In hands-on exercises, learn how to replicate these techniques to make your own comparisons for time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, calculate productivity metrics using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. You can leverage these new metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments in your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.

Laptops Preferred. To take full advantage of this tutorial, delegates should bring a Windows-based PC (with admin rights) for use during data capture and productivity calculations. If you can’t bring one, share with another delegate.

Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 8:30am
Keynote
An Agile Throwdown: Munich Takes on the Columbus Agile Benchmark Study

Agile has not only gone mainstream, it’s gone global. Data on agile team performance, time-to-market, and quality have emerged in the past decade. In 2012, a group of Columbus, Ohio, companies—business, IT, and financial services firms—participated in the first ever “Columbus Agile vs. the World” study. They collected velocity, schedule, effort, staffing, and quality data which were compared against QSM’s Software Lifecycle Management (SLIM) database. Analysis revealed delivery was 31 percent faster with 75 percent fewer defects than industry norms. Enter Munich, Germany. At their OOP 2013 conference, the Columbus results were presented. German companies elected to participate in a QSM-led study of their own to compare their results against Columbus, specifically with regard to time-to-market and quality. Join Michael Mah to look at data patterns for both Munich and Columbus, illustrated side by side. The results might surprise you. See how both cities compared against the SLIM worldwide database of 12,000 completed projects. Michael also discusses what might lie ahead as companies adopt methods from XP to Scrum to lean.