Presented on March 20, 2007 - Software Development West

Planning is important even for projects using agile processes such as XP, Scrum or Feature-Driven Development. Unfortunately, we’ve all seen so many worthless plans that we’d like to throw them away altogether. The good news is that it is possible to create a project plan that looks forward six to nine months that can be accurate and useful.

In this half-day tutorial, we’ll not only examine why traditional plans fail, but explore why planning is still necessary—even on agile projects. We’ll look at various approaches for estimating, including unit-less points and ideal time. The class will describe four techniques for deriving estimates, as well as when and how to re-estimate. We will look at techniques to create a plan that dramatically improves the project’s chances of on-time completion. Also discussed will be using velocity to track progress against the plan.

This tutorial is equally suited for managers, programmers, testers or anyone involved in estimating or planning a project.