This course is in partnership with Mike Cohn and Mountain Goat Software. We are one of a handful of companies that has been authorized by Mountain Goat Software to provide training classes based on Mike Cohn's books and training materials.
Planning is important, even for agile projects. Unfortunately, we've all seen so many worthless plans that we'd like to throw planning out 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. Too many teams view planning as something to be avoided and too many organizations view plans as something to hold against their development teams.
Learn how to break that cycle by learning and practicing skills that will help create useful plans that lead to reliable decision‐making. The course will describe four techniques for deriving estimates, including how to use the popular Planning Poker technique.
Course Outline
- Why Plans Go Wrong - We have been planning our work for years, yet the results are the same - over schedule and over budget. Why? We will explore reasons why our plans go wrong and what to do about it.
- Story Point Estimation - A story point is a curious thing. It is difficult to understand and measure - or is it? We will go deep on what a story point is and how to use them to create accurate schedules.
- Ideal Day Estimation - Time is constant and as a result, our days should be as well. However, sometimes we estimate in “ideal days” which imply that things are not always constant. We will discuss the positive and negative of ideal days.
- Estimation Techniques - What are the right techniques to estimate our work? Planning Poker? Analogous estimation? Triangulation? Or mayby just plain old gut feel. We will do exercises on Planning Poker, giving you a tool to use today.
- Sprint Planning - Planning our sprints can be a challenge, especially in the time allocated. Ways to run effective sprint planning meetings and techniques to decompose our tasks will be practiced.
- Release Planning - Where does the project roadmap come into play on an agile project? It’s all in release planning. Release planning might seem challenging, but you will learn ways to simplify it and make it easy to understand.
- Buffered Planning - We have learned to take estimates and double them, just to be safe. There are, however, better ways to do this. In this section of the course, we will look at how to build a buffer into a plan mathmatically..
Who should attend this session? It’s for anyone involved in planning or estimating projects, like programmers, project managers, testers, and other members of delivery teams.
The goal is for each audience member to walk away not only with a greater appreciation and understanding of estimating and planning in agile, but also with specific improvements they can implement right away.