March 5, 2010

Quick Solutions Inc. in Columbus Ohio asked if I’d be their featured speaker at their Agile Symposium for the company and it’s clients. It’s called, “Agile vs. Industry, How Does Agile Compare?”

Well, one exciting aspect of this speech will be “How does QSI compare?” Their teams provided basic velocity, effort, and defect metrics, and the results are superb. I decided to create a case study on their behalf, and combine it with slides from my OOP Conference speech that I gave in Munich, Germany about a month ago.

This is going to be an incredible day of debate, dialog, and town-meeting style discussion of Agile. If you’re part of the Quick Solutions client community, don’t miss it! Unless you want to wait and see about coming to Germany next year if I deliver a similar talk there… 🙂 http://bit.ly/cNHkRu

Text of the announcement is below, with pictures of their Agile environment:

Many companies are adopting Agile practices in an effort to increase project throughput, reduce cost, and improve quality. But are they working? Drawing from industry statistics, Michael answers vital questions about Agile’s effectiveness, which may be turning the “law of software physics” upside down. Until now, there have been predictable relationships among schedule, staffing, and quality; industry data indicates Agile may be changing all this. See productivity findings at 5 Agile companies, and the results for time-to-market, productivity, and quality. Learn the right practices for your environment, including characteristics of successful measurement. See how metrics reveal insights into Agile approaches that are becoming mainstream.

Michael Mah is managing partner at QSM Associates Inc. He teaches, writes, and consults to technology companies on estimating and managing software projects, whether in-house, offshore, waterfall, or agile. He is the director of the Benchmarking Practice at the Cutter Consortium, a US-based IT think-tank. With over 25 years of experience, QSM has derived productivity patterns for thousands of projects collected worldwide. His work examines time-pressure dynamics of teams, and its role in project success and failure. His background is in physics and electrical engineering, and he is a mediator specializing in conflict resolution for technology projects.