User Stories, a key practice from Extreme Programming, provide a right-sized solution to more efficiently identify, track and implement product requirements. Learn how identify, write and decompose "good" user stories that drive agile behavior and business value.

Gartner has predicted that by 2007, most companies will adopt, in some IT projects, methodologies that are labeled “agile”. However, at least 25% of these projects will actually be following, implicitly or explicitly, “waterfall” style development.

Why? Because companies do not understand agile requirements gathering techniques. Learn how to leverage User Stories to align development to the business, drive value to the business and drive agile behaviors within the development team.

NOTE: Pete Behrens spent 7 years developing the leading requirements management solution - IBM Rational RequisitePro. Come find out why he switched.

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.

"YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It)" and "Doing the simplest thing possible" are mantras of agile development. A white board, sticky notes, and flip chart paper are by far the best tools for individual teams. However, when coordinating work across 10 - 50 teams across 12 time zones, more tooling is required. Learn how agile enterprises are leveraging tooling to manage their portfolios, projects and products.

Teams are often distributed, offshore and dependent on other teams which require assistance to effectively manage. Furthermore, IT governance requires additional oversight in project and portfolio management for tracking investments, return on investments and reporting status to the business and other executive stakeholders.

This session walks through various phases of the agile software lifecycle and provides tooling examples used to help facilitate each phase. Examples from two 300+ agile development organizations will be referenced to provide a context for the discussion. Specific agile project management tools discussed include VersionOne, Rally and Microsoft Team System, ScrumWorks, Conchango ScrumVSTS, XPlanner, ExtremePlanner as well as traditional workflow tools and manual tools.

UPDATE: With over 500 responses to our recent tooling survey, we have incorporated the tooling results from companies across the world are using to enable, manage and scale their agile processes.

NOTE: While there are many agile tools available for code refactoring, automated tests, automated builds, and test-driven development; this session focuses on agile project management tools for managing portfolios, projects, iterations, teams, tasks, and other project artifacts.

Are you overrunning your architectural runway? Many companies struggle with their ability to retain their architectural integrity when they transition to agile methods. Emergent Architecture (the other EA) can lead to cowboy coding and ad-hoc design decisions that emerge into a poor overall architecture.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been a tried and true approach to address these architectural needs throughout the organization, yet this approach often leads to a heavy-handed, document-rich, control-oriented culture lacking ability to keep pace with today's dynamic business environment.

Attempting to integrate an agile process with an Enterprise Architecture approach can be like mixing oil and water - they just don't work together. This session evaluates alternatives in balancing Agility and EA and proposes an architectural approach to build an Agile Enterprise Architecture into your organization.

This session begins with an evaluation of the strengths of Enterprise Architecture and Agility and various approaches in the industry today that are attempting to balance the two. Enterprise Architecture (EA) means more than technology - it includes business architecture, information architecture, operational architecture, organizational architecture, technical architecture and infrastructure architecture.

There are many EA models available today including the Zachmann Framework, McGovern/Stevens Model, and the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) framework just to name a few. Each of these frameworks provides a valuable perspective on EA, but all of them depend on your organization to execute them effectively and require adjustments to increase their agility.

We will look specifically at the architect's role in an agile process to retain application integrity and enable organizational agility to meet the changing business needs.