Atlantis:  How Agile Kept Us From Sinking

To download a copy of the presentation, click here.

A huge project intended to deliver the next generation of a web based product is approved.  Discovery and requirements gathering begins.  Scope increases. Forecast to complete increases. Time to delivery increases.  Six months in to the project the estimates for cost and time to completion are more than 2.5 times the original proposal -- and continuing to increase.  Finger pointing begins and the product team blames the development team.  The development team blames the product team.  The project is out of control....

Sound familiar?

But then something unexpected occurs - a perfect storm of opportunity. Unrelated organizational changes shift responsibilities and a proposal to try Agile gains agreement. But can an 80 person team adopt a new methodology, put in place dozens of new processes, resolve hundreds of challenges, and make an aggressive date at a reduced cost?

In this presentation you will hear the story of how a project staff went from a group of frustrated, discouraged individuals in distinct groups to a highly energized, unified product development team that delivered an outstanding product to rave reviews.  We will touch on the challenges in moving from waterfall to Agile, changing the culture, overcoming organizational obstacles, and managing a complicated product build with multiple distributed Agile teams. Team Atlantis members will share their experiences and how those experiences changed the way they look at product development - forever.

The Good, Bad, and the Puzzling: The Agile Experience at Five Companies

Michael Mah, Managing partner at QSM Associates

To download a copy of the presentation, click here.

Strategic software development - and failures - happen every day; Agile methods offer a major paradigm shift. But are they working? Drawing from industry statistics, Michael answers vital questions about Agile’s effectiveness, which may be turning the “law of software physics” upside down. Until now, there have been predictable relationships among schedule, staffing, quality; industry data indicates Agile may be changing all this. See productivity findings at 5 Agile companies, & the results for time-to-market, productivity, & quality. Learn the right practices for your environment, including characteristics of successful measurement. See how metrics reveal insights into Agile approaches that are becoming mainstream.

Agile Overview

Bob Fischer, Principal Consultant, Enagility, LLC

The presentation from this session is available here.

This session will provide a brief overview of the underlying philosophy and practices of Agile including:

• The Agile Manifesto
• Why you would choose to use agile
• The core practices of agile including:
  • The roles on an agile team
  • User stories
  • Release Planning
  • Iteration Planning
  • Daily stand-ups
  • Iteration reviews
• Agile technical practices
• Methods of measuring progress