Presentation given at the European Plone Symposium 2009 about how Zest Software uses eXtreme Management to support Agile Software Development.

1. Agile Project Management
Speaker : Jean-Paul Ladage
Date :May 14th, 2009
Location : European Plone Symposium 2009

3. Agilito
Iterations eXtreme Management
Planning game
SCRUM Sprints Customer involvement
Pair programming
Time tracking
Communication
User Stories
Performance
monitoring
Release plan
Scheduling
Tasks Sharing Knowledge

4. Introduction
• Jean-Paul Ladage
• Sales and Technical Director

5. About Zest
• Stuck with Plone for 7 years ;)
• 12 employees
• We design, develop, support, host and teach
• Plone Foundation Premium Sponsor Hosting

6. Extreme Programming

7. Customer involvement
• Most customers don’t see the complexity we are
dealing with. Ask as much questions as you can
•
Most companies, Zest
Let them write user stories and assist in writing included, used Agile to
not do any project
acceptance criteria management at all.
We lived from
•
iteration meeting to
Provide an overall plan, but more important iteration meeting
update your plan regularly
Why write a plan
when nobody ever
looks at it again.
• Work on-site as much as possible The value is in the
planning activity, the
resulting plan is
• End each iteration with an Iteration meeting

8. Estimating
• Estimating user stories can be a real pain ...
• Relative estimates seems to work best
• Only use these numbers:1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13, 20
• Estimate in perfect days or story points
• Make estimating fun http://planningpoker.com

9. Estimating

10. Iteration meetings
• Provide a demo of the finished stories
• Try to get as much feedback as possible
• Discuss the feedback with the team and update
the stories for the new iteration
• Play the planning game
• Let the customer re-prioritize the user stories

11. Iteration meetings

12. Time tracking
• Our brains are playing tricks on us. We tend to
shrink the time spent on tasks. Working for 3
hours today seems like 2 hours tomorrow
• Register your time on a daily basis. Or even
better, after each activity
• Don’t forget interruptions like phone calls or high
priority bugs
• Make time tracking as easy as possible

13. Project managers
• Project managers need information to manage a
project.
• They need to monitor multiple projects
• Resources utilization
• Scheduling iterations

14. Scheduling
• Ideally we work at one project at a time
• We almost always have multiple projects
• Serialize projects. Work on one project for one
week and on another the next.

15. Lessons learned
• Customer expectation is everything!
• Dare to say no to your customer
• Involve your customers in the process In the early days we tended
•
to accepting nice new
Communicate the value you deliver
features, because we are
developers and love the
challenge.
A big mistake is to think, hey
we can do this in just 2
hours. You are forgetting it
took you many years of
experience to get to that
point

16. Get the Software
• http://plone.org/products/extreme-management-tool
• This package is providing the functionality in the
Plone Default skin.
• Use the xm.theme package to make the UI more
usable.

17. Questions?
grab me for a drink in the sun.
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