Agile Planning, Phasing and Project Management

(RAT804 – 1 day)

More and more projects are moving to agile, iterative and incremental development styles, fundamentally because they reduce the risks of development. This course discusses the issues surrounding agile development, in particular risk minimization and phasing work in increments, gaining the feedback necessary to ensure you navigate your way to success despite all the problems that come up.

See www.ratio.co.uk/W12.html for an introductory article on this topic.

Programming for Programmers

Features

This course discusses:

• planning in appropriate detail – in depth for the short term, in broad strokes for the long term
• negotiating with scope – when faced with an imposed deadline
• how customer dictates priority – of what should be implemented when
• planning that follows reality – using detailed increment plans
• why feedback is vital – plan to get feedback to mitigate your risks
• using three types of release – internal, investigative and production
• planning to refactor when necessary – to stop design rot setting in
• considering high impact design decisions during early increments
• the trade-off the costs and benefits of incremental development

Audience:

Technical staff and managers who are likely to be involved in agile, iterative and incremental development projects.

Additional Details

Agenda:

Introduction waterfall development and it’s risks risks overview – technology, people, experience, communications, mistakes etc. all projects are incremental viewed from far enough iterative development incremental development feedback from iterative and incremental development “maintenance” exercises Agile planning · Three types of plan Initial scoping plan - feature/story/use case overview (high level) broad increment plan (what/when, approx) detailed increment plan (committed) increment duration increment review continuous replanning bug and feature backlog exercises

Detailed increment planning early days – risk minimisation, high impact decisions (non-functional requirements) feedback is vital (code, estimates, etc) code at any point prove it in code refactoring – why it is necessary how automated testing supports refactoring estimating and feedback feedback – working system exercises Using a development process processes overview document it? maintaining documents? Releases internal releases investigative releases production releases trading off the costs of release (documentation, database migration, etc.) exercises Questions, discussion and course wrap up