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.

This session continues the discussion from Part I on Agile Estimating, Planning and Tracking focusing on the sprint (or iteration) level rather than the release level. The sprint cycle is the heartbeat of an agile process. Running smoothly and efficiently it drives incredibly productive teams and high-quality solutions. Yet, so often it feels unhealthy and arrhythmic.

This session will provide the characteristics of a heathly sprint heartbeat and demonstrate the key components required to keep it running that way.

This session will discuss many components of a sprint including the sprint planning process, task estimation, task tracking and dependency, daily stand up meetings, demonstration reviews and retrospectives.

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.