Michael McCullough will discuss the application of games and simulations to enable learning and application of agile principles and practices. This interactive session will focus on how games can be an effective technique for agile champions to communicate complex ideas and concepts. Michael will also discuss some best practices for running games and simulations in your organization.

Three-Day Course : January 25 - 27, 2010 by Janet Gregory

This three day course explains how testers can become valued agile team
members, how they contribute to delivering a continuous stream of business
value, and ways to overcome common cultural and logistical obstacles in
transitioning to an agile development process. It describes the values and
principles that help testers adopt an agile testing mindset, and how the
whole team contributes to the success of any testing practices, including
automation.

Students will be shown how to complete testing activities in short
iterations, and how testers contribute on a daily basis during each
iteration and release cycle. Through interactive exercises and group
discussions, participants will discover good strategies for driving
development with both executable and manual tests. The course is filled with
real-life examples of the many ways agile testers add value.

The course is aimed at anyone on who wants to learn what testing means on an
agile team. All team members will benefit from understanding their
contribution and the interaction with testers on the team. Test/QA and
development managers, who work with testers, will also find the course
valuable. Basic agile knowledge is recommended so the participants can
actively contribute with questions and shared experiences.

Email: janet@agiletester.ca if you are interested.
Details of course outline and registration: http://www.janetgregory.ca/training.htm

Developing reliable software estimates continues to elude many organizations. Recent studies suggest that over one‐third of
software projects suffer from schedule and/or cost over‐runs severe enough to warrant the projects as failures. One reason for
such poor industry performance is that progress in this area has been relatively slow compared to the tremendous advances in
technology and software methods over the last three decades. Traditional industry techniques for estimating software projects
(e.g. COCOMO II, SLIM) remain highly complex, require non‐intuitive inputs, and are geared toward large waterfall projects. The
advent of Agile and other progressive‐elaboration software methods has seen a trend towards empirical estimation techniques
that focus on relatively short iterations, but fail in their attempt to accurately estimate entire software projects. In the face of
these difficulties, many organizations continue to rely on naive “seat‐of‐the‐pants” estimation approaches. In response to these
issues, Quadrus has developed an easily accessible and accurate estimation methodology that successfully models real‐world
software projects through the use of simulation and Monte Carlo methods ‐ the next generation in software project estimation.

A key function of the Business Analyst (BA) on any software development project is that of requirements gathering and creating user stories. One of the hardest questions posed of a Business Analyst is how long the project will take based upon these requirements. When considering that over one-third of project failures are attributed to poor estimates and estimation techniques it is not surprising that better estimates yield improved return on investment, more stable and sustainable products and enhanced IT credibility. Business Analysts can enhance their value to the team and to project stakeholders by utilizing the Quadrus Estimation Methodology ("QEM"), an estimation practice proven to deliver more accurate and reliable estimates.

Agile 2009 will be an exciting international conference about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and first-hand experience, from both the management and technical sides of agile software development. The agile approach focuses on delivering business value early in the project lifetime and being able to incorporate emergent requirements. It accentuates the use of rich, informal communication channels and frequent delivery of running, tested systems, while attending to the human component of software development.

Agile 2009 gives attendees access to the latest thinking in this domain, and bridges communities that rarely get a chance to exchange ideas and thoughts. It brings together researchers from labs and academia with executives, managers, and developers in the trenches of software development. The conference is not about a single methodology or approach, but rather provides a forum for the exchange of information regarding all agile development technologies.

This presentation will introduce the next generation in software project estimation and demonstrate the Quadrus estimation toolset.

The speaker will be reknown author and agile persona Gerard Meszaros, who has been working on a brand new book.

Show Me the Money - Applying Agile Principles to Data Warehousing Development to add incremental Business Value

"Agile from the Ivory Tower"

Microsoft patterns & practices group has the reputation of being early adopters of agile methods at Microsoft. With his insight and enthusiasm, Grigori will give you a taste of his team's agile process, challenges they faced and present lessons learnt from several projects (both successful and not so successful). He'll discuss the topics of customer-connectedness, agile planning and estimation, team formation, dealing with distributed teams, software acceptance and others.