Agile Project Management

Goals

As our software projects become more complex, and delivery time-frames continue to shrink, we need new approaches and new processes to enable success. This 2-day course is designed to inform and enable software organizations to migrate from the traditional, Waterfall development process to iterative and agile development processes.

At the end of this course, the student will be able to:

Identify the practices of iterative, agile project management
Articulate the similarities and differences among the most popular iterative processes
Apply basic estimation and planning practices based upon case-study exercises
Understand how each stakeholder group is affected by adopting an iterative, agile process

Duration

Two days.

Prerequisites

Experience in software project management, business or systems analysis, or requirements gathering is desirable, but not mandatory.

Cost

Please call 803-781-7628 for public enrollment and private, on-site pricing.

Description

This course is a 2-day, highly interactive curriculum that focuses on the conduct of project management in an iterative, agile software development process. Comparisons and contrasts of traditional waterfall project management versus an iterative approach are discussed, with emphasis on the business justifications for adopting the iterative, agile approach. The students attain a thorough understanding of the major iterative, agile processes currently in practice: Scrum, agile Unified Process and Extreme Programming. This course explores how moving to an agile process affects project stakeholders such as business analysts, developers, testers, and project managers. The students learn how to partition a project into iterations, and define the content and duration for each iteration. A comprehensive end-of-course case study exercise lets students apply the course concepts to establish user stories, estimate effort for these stories in story points or ideal days, perform Release Planning, and then construct at least one Iteration Plan, splitting stories into tasks and estimating these tasks.

Topics

Introduction

– Course Objectives

– Table of Contents

– Group Discussion

Iterative Development

– The Iterative Philosophy

– The Business Case for Iteration

– Group Discussion

Agile Development

– Agility ― What Does It Mean?

– The Agile Manifesto

– Agile Principles

– Agile Project Mgmt Practices

– Group Discussion

Scrum

– Scrum Practices

– Structure of Scrum

– Project Management in Scrum

– Group Discussion

Rational Unified Process

– RUP Key Principles

– Structure of RUP

– Unified Method Architecture

– Project Management in RUP

– Group Discussion

Extreme Programming

– XP Practices

– Structure of XP

– Project Management in XP

– Group Discussion

Agile’s Affect on Stakeholders

– Business Analyst

– Developer

– Project Manager

– Tester

Transitioning to Agile

– People Are the Longer-Term Project

– Planning vs. Execution

– Your First Agile Projects

– Team Structure & Decision-Making

– When is an Iteration Done?

– Adapting to Change

Project Manager’s View of an
Agile Developer

– Developers Estimate

– Continuously Integrated

– Automate, Automate, Automate

– Make it Public, Never Private

Agile Estimation

– Story Points

– User Stories

– Ideal Days

– Estimating Actual Effort

– Velocity

– Velocity & Actual Time

– Planning Poker

Project Exercise

– Deals on Wheels Case Study

Wrapup

References

Audience

Project Managers, business or system analysts, technical managers, and software developers who wish to learn the philosophy of agility, and iterative, agile project management skills.

For more information about this course or other courses please contact Evanetics at 1-803-781-7628.