June: Agile Project Planning and Estimating Overview (preliminary)

Preliminary: Topic may change if we get a guest presenter

Too many people think that Agile means 'no planning needed.' Nothing could be further from the truth. As the saying goes, "If you don't know where you're going, then any road will take you there." Every project needs a goal, and a plan to achieve that goal, and Agile is no different. This presentation is about what happens after you've decided to go with Scrum, but before you've kicked off the project. I'll cover the following topics:

What Are Our Goals - establishing the Project Vision
What Do We Need To Do - creating the product backlog from our requirements
What Should We Do First - prioritizing the product backlog, by business priority subject to technical constraints
How Hard Will It Be - estimating each user story in the backlog using complexity rather than time
How Are We Going To Do It - creating a release plan with proposed iterations based on estimated team velocity
How Long Should It Take - calculating the # of iterations until the release

At the end of the presentation attendees should have a good overview of the Agile planning and estimating process. More important, you should be able to go back to work and look at current in-progress Scrum-based projects, evaluating whether or not your project plan is sufficient.