SEP Event: Tips for Effective Visualization and Why Forecasting Fails

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Why Forecasting Fails
Universally, estimating software stories and tasks is hated by developers and most normal people. Almost as universally agreed, the results obtained from forecasting using those estimates are dismal. This session begins by listing the top ten reasons why estimation is a flawed approach and then goes onto offer simple alternative techniques. The alternative techniques described are simple to implement and will perform better than traditional estimation (not a high bar), and often better than intuition alone.

Tips for Effective Visualization
The evening before the space shuttle Challenger explosion, scientists at NASA caught what they thought was a potentially catastrophic risk. They brought the issue to management attention but the visualizations they used failed to influence the final decision enough to stop the launch. As a leader in your organization, your failure to influence may not cost lives but it could be “catastrophic” for your business. This session presents the more effective alternative to the NASA engineers’ and extracts 10 tips from that and other examples.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Troy has been involved with technology companies since 1994, fulfilling roles from QA through to VP for multinational companies. Troy speaks at many Agile conferences and has played an Agile training and mentoring role for executives in small and large organizations. Previous clients include: Walmart, Microsoft, Skype, Sabre Airline Solutions, Siemens Healthcare.Troy currently consults and trains organizations wanting to improve decision making on software portfolio and project questions through Agile and Lean thinking and tools. Applying Scrum and Lean techniques appropriately and where they are going to make this biggest benefit through quantitative rigor.Troy has many books and articles on software development and practices, his most recent is “Forecasting and Simulating Software Development Projects: Effective Modeling of Kanban & Scrum Projects using Monte Carlo Simulation”.

Larry Maccherone is an accomplished author and highly rated speaker who has regularly presented at major international conferences on lean and agile. He recently joined AgileCraft where his passion for analytics and visualization is helping AgileCraft be the best way to scale agile. Prior to that, he led the Insights product line at Rally Software. His core area of expertise is drawing interesting insights from data that allow people to make better decisions.