Agile Estimating and Planning

Too many teams regard planning as something to be avoided and too many organisations view plans as something to hold against their development teams, yet planning is a key part of all projects, even agile ones. Despite the questionable usefulness of past plans, it is possible to create a project plan that looks forward six to nine months and is accurate and useful. This one−day class will provide insight into the common reasons why traditional planning approaches fail and participants will learn practices that really do work.

This class teaches participants new skills to use in creating improved plans for reliable decision-making. Participants leave with a solid understanding of, and experience with, agile release and iteration planning. Multiple approaches to estimating, including unit-less points and ideal time are demonstrated and participants will be taught four techniques for deriving estimates, including the popular Planning Poker® technique. Such techniques have been shown to increase estimation accuracy and these proven planning techniques dramatically increase any project’s chances of on-time completion.

You will learn

• The importance of estimating size and deriving duration
• The differences between story points and ideal time
• The advantages of an abstract measure of size
• Techniques of estimating and how and when to re-estimate
• How and when to perform release and iteration planning
• Tips for communicating about estimates and plans

This course is licensed from Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software. Mike has 15 years of experience with planning techniques on agile projects and is the author of the most popular book on this subject: Agile Estimating and Planning. This course has been delivered to numerous professionals around the world.

Course Outline

1. What is Agile Planning?
   • The precision trap
   • Reliable decision making
2. Sprint planning
   • Working in priority order
   • Velocity-driven planning
   • Commitment-driven planning
   • The purpose of sprint planning
   • Improving over time
3. Units for the Product Backlog
   • Ideal days Story points
   • Each approach has its merits
   • Comparing the two approaches
4. Techniques for Estimating
   • Estimating by analogy
   • Disaggregation Planning Poker® Anchoring
   • When to re-estimate
5. Release Planning
   • Estimating velocity
   • Fixed-date projects
   • Fixed-scope projects
   • Using a range
6. Planning With Large Teams
   • A common estimating unit
   • Sprint planning
   • Managing dependencies

PMPs: This course counts for 8 Professional Development Units.

About the Instructor

Rowan Bunning is a Certified Scrum Trainer and a pioneer of Scrum in Australasia. With a background in web design, object-oriented development, Extreme Programming and Scrum, Rowan became Australia’s first Certified ScrumMaster and first Certified Scrum Practitioner. He has built extensive experience leading, coaching, and training organisations in Scrum across Australasia and Europe, including European Scrum leader EMC Consulting (formerly Conchango). As a Certified Scrum Trainer he has a fantastic track record for running comprehensive and high value Scrum courses. His courses include the two day Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Product Owner courses with associated accreditations with the Scrum Alliance. He also offers one day courses on Effective User Stories and Agile Estimating and Planning as licensed from Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software – author of the most popular books on these topics.

Through his company Scrum WithStyle, Rowan delivers consulting and training helping a diverse range of organisations throughout Australia and New Zealand to succeed with Agile. Frustrated with the substantial waste, poor delivery track-record and lack of trust that he sees on many IT projects, Rowan is passionate about the enormous potential to improve business value, collaboration and productivity through the disciplined application of agile methods. Rowan is highly active in the Agile community internationally and has spoken at several conferences in Europe and North America including the London Scrum Gathering in 2007. In Australia, Rowan founded a successful Agile special interest group supported by the Australian Computer Society and helped to initiate Scrum User Groups in Sydney and Brisbane. Rowan holds a Bachelors degree in Information Technology.