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Agile approaches to software development promise many advantages:
shorter schedules, more productive teams, products that better meet customer expectations,
higher quality, and more. In this talk, Mike will explain how agile teams achieve
these goals by avoiding the seven deadly sins of project management. Covered will
be sins such as gluttony, sloth, lust, opaqueness, and more. Giving in to one of
these temptations can result in a failed or cancelled project. Along the way you’ll
be introduced to key aspects of agile development and hear stories of agile success
and failure.
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Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat
Software. Mike specializes in helping companies adopt and improve their use of agile
processes and techniques to build extremely high performance development organizations.
He is the author of Agile Estimating and Planning and User Stories Applied
for Agile Software Development, as well as books on Java and C++ programming. With
more than 20 years of experience, Mike has previously been a technology executive
in companies of various sizes, from startup to Fortune 40. He has also written articles
for Better Software magazine, IEEE Computer, Software Test
and Quality Engineering, Agile Times, Cutter IT Journal, and the
C++ Users' Journal. Mike is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and was a
founder of both the Agile Alliance and the Scrum Alliance. He is a Certified Scrum
Trainer and a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM.
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Strategic software development is happening every day—and
failures continue to plague us. Unquestionably, a major paradigm shift is underway
with the movement to agile methods. But are they really working? With results drawn
from industry statistics, Michael Mah answers vital questions about the effectiveness
of agile methodologies—XP, Scrum, TDD, pair programming, etc. One discovery
underway is that agile methods could be turning the “law of software physics”
upside down. For decades, there have been predictable relationships among schedule
pressure, staff ramp-up, and bug rates; now, industry data tells us that all this
could be changing with agile. Join Michael Mah for a revealing discussion of productivity
findings at five—all ostensibly agile—companies, and how they produced
a range of results for time-to-market, productivity, and quality. Michael addresses
questions such as: Which agile practices are right for your environment? What are
the characteristics of a successful agile deployment? How do you measure success
or failure of agile process change? Find out how the five case study companies “did”
agile in their own ways and how their metrics reveal insights into new agile approaches
that are fast becoming mainstream.
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Michael Mah
is director of the Benchmarking Practice, an author with the Cutter Consortium,
and managing partner of QSM Associates, Inc., specializing in software measurement
and project estimation. Michael has written extensively and consulted with the world’s
leading software organizations, while collecting data on thousands of projects worldwide.
Michael’s book-in-progress, Optimal Friction, examines the dynamics of
teams under time pressure and its role in contributing to success and failure. He
lives in the mountains of western Massachusetts with his two young children. Michael
can be reached at
www.qsma.com.
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One of the seven principles of Lean
Thinking is “eliminate waste.” Eliminating waste means minimizing the
cost of the resources we use to deliver software to our stakeholders. Jean Tabaka
proposes three pivotal practices that we must embrace to aggressively attack waste
in software delivery—Software as a Service (SaaS), Community, and Fast Feature
Throughput. SaaS eliminates waste by deploying software-based services without the
cost inherent in traditional software delivery—materials, shipping, time delay,
and more. Community involves stakeholders working together to create products rather
than competing among themselves for limited resources. Community eliminates waste
by democratizing software development to obviate the need for multiple systems with
the same functionality. Fast Feature Throughput refers to development methods that
embrace change and quickly deliver value to customers. It eliminates waste by responding
to market pull with short, incremental delivery cycles. When IT and all software
organizations embrace these practices, they will eliminate waste within their organizations,
reduce the waste that consumes our entire industry, and ultimately support the broad
21st century global mandate to manage our scarce resources.
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Jean
Tabaka is an agile mentor and coach with Rally Software Development.
In addition to being a Certified Scrum Trainer and Practitioner, she is also a Certified
Professional Facilitator. Her unique blend of passions and skills has been applied
in a variety of organizations—large and small, co-located and distributed—eager
to adopt the best of agile and bring out the best in their teams. Author of the
Agile Software Development Series book Collaboration Explained, Jean holds
a Masters in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. When not sharing her
agile passion with clients, she resides in beautiful Boulder, Colorado.
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Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
You’ve managed projects, but they’re never easy.
They don’t fit into the nice definitions found in project management books.
Your schedules are generally off. There are always unkind surprises. Although you’re
not failing, you feel you could be more successful. There is a solution. Based on
her many years of consulting with large and small software teams, Johanna Rothman
coaches leaders to take a more pragmatic approach. Employ mini-projects and iterations
to explore alternative technologies. Use incremental steps to finish features one
at a time when you don’t know how far along you are. Make sure stakeholders
agree on what “done” really means. Learn how to escape the dreaded trap
of “multi-tasking,” a management style that drains energy from everyone
whenever there is a task switch. One final secret every project manager must discover:
There is no “one right way” to manage a project. Everything depends
on context—the company and its products, the technology employed, the people
on your team, and you. If you can learn to keep everything in balance, you will
have a successful project. Let something get out of whack, and you can kiss all
your hard work goodbye.
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Johanna Rothman helps managers define and solve
problems. She assists managers, teams, and organizations to become more effective.
Johanna has helped engineering organizations, IT organizations, and startups hire
technical people, manage projects, and release successful products faster. Johanna
is the author of Manage It! Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management
and Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets
and Science of Hiring Technical People, and coauthor with Esther Derby of the pragmatic
Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management. Johanna is a host and session
leader at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference.
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