June 22, 2006

Next week, I’ll be giving this keynote address at the Better Software Conference in Las Vegas Nevada. I’m pretty excited about sharing a case study demonstrating before/after productivity and defect patterns on Agile Methods. My team collected actual time-to-market, effort, sizing, and defect information for an organization that made a major strategic investment in extreme programming. We gathered the hard numbers and the environmental attributes for both traditional and agile releases and compared the two. For more information, see the Better Software conference website.

Better Software 2006 Keynote Abstract: “Agile Productivity Metrics”

Abstract: Enough of the stories. Where is the quantitative proof that agile methods like Extreme Programming (XP) deliver higher productivity and quality? Such data have gone missing for years now, perhaps because agile practitioners and metrics experts have never fully cooperated to crack this difficult problem.

Whatever the reason, the wait is now over. In this presentation, Michael Mah will discuss how productivity benchmarking techniques were successfully applied on numerous real-world XP projects, where a company’s development approach was transformed using agile methods by XP expert Joshua Kerievsky. He’ll give an overview of the projects analyzed, explain an approach to gathering “Agile Productivity Metrics,” review how the data was interpreted, and show what was revealed in the time-to-market and quality numbers. This presentation concludes with a glimpse of the kind of agile management and measurement that is possible when you collect the right information.