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.

Are you being asked to measure your agility? How productive is your team? What is the quality of your product? How accurate are your estimates? Be careful, you will get what you measure.

This session will evaluate metrics which attempt to measure productivity, quality, esimation accuracy, value, and return on investment within the context of an agile project. What measurements are teams using and why? We will explore various measurements used by session participants and discuss some of their pros and cons.

We will discuss the pros and cons of various metrics and how each has the potential to create dysfunction within the team and how they can be "gamed".