Rocky Mountain Software Symposium

November 10 - 12, 2006 - Denver, CO


Renaissance Suites Flatiron
500 Flatiron Blvd
Denver, CO   80021
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Pete Behrens

Organizational Agility Coach

Pete Behrens is the Founder and President of Trail Ridge Consulting, a firm specializing in enterprise-wide agile transitions and adoption. Their Organizational Agility Services align proven agile organizational patterns with enterprise-enabled agile practices to transform organizational ability to organizational agility.

Pete Behrens is a Certified Scrum Trainer and a Certified Scrum Coach. He has been guiding enterprise agile implementations for the past 8 years. Pete has over 178 years experience leading product development and architecture in adaptive, iterative and phased-based development methods for EDS and Rational Software. He led development of RequisitePro, the leading requirements management solution in the IBM Rational product line. He has extensive experience developing under the Rational Unified Process (RUP), Rapid Application Development (RAD), as well as traditional waterfall approaches. You can contact him at pete@trailridgeconsulting.com



Presentations

Agile Estimating, Planning and Tracking: Part I

Business leaders and stakeholders require accountability and accuracy in our software release projections and yet, as an industry, we have failed. However, many of these same leaders are not convinced that agile is any more than an excuse to avoid projections at all. While it is true that agility provides the framework to support change, it doesn't mean you can't provide accurate projections. In fact, a well-executed agile process actually provides more accurate results with less time investment than traditional methods. This session will demonstrate these agile project management techniques to manage 6-12 month projects.

This session focuses on the release level, followed by Part II which focuses on the sprint level.

In this session we will demonstrate an engaging agile team estimation technique to drive more accurate projections than traditional estimation techniques provide. Then we will explore multi-level planning and tracking practices to guide your understanding of how to use those estimates to manage your release goals.

A Scrum Experience

Scrum is a very easy agile framework to understand, but is very difficult in practice. Why is that?

For one, Scrum requires compressing an entire software lifecycle into very short time increments of 2-4 weeks in length. It requires cross-functional team commitment, discipline, communication, and collaboration to accomplish their goals. These changes are difficult and often expose organizational and environmental issues that must be addressed for the team to be successful.

This session brings focus to the Scrum heartbeat - the sprint. After a brief introduction of the Scrum framework and a focus on the sprint, we will be taking an experiential hands-on journey through a full sprint with your newly formed team.

This session incorporates all of the components of the sprint including sprint planning, daily standup meetings, product development and integration work days, and a sprint review and retrospective. This brief exposure will illustrate many of the issues and difficulties that surface in Scrum and what your team can do to be more effective.