On Monday, October 24th, Agile Denver welcomes Mike Cohn, local Agile expert and author of a new book on planning and estimating for Agile teams.

Planning is important even for projects using agile processes such as Scrum or XP. Unfortunately, we've all seen so many worthless plans that we'd like to throw them away altogether. The good news is that it is possible to create a project plan that looks forward six to nine months that can be accurate and useful.

In this class we will look at why traditional plans fail but why planning is still necessary even on agile projects. We will learn the importance of estimating size and deriving duration. We will practice estimating by playing "planning poker," which has been shown to result in higher-quality estimates and plans.

This session is equally suited for managers, programmers, testers, or anyone involved in estimating or planning a project, or who has ever given an incorrect estimate.

PLEASE NOTE: The meeting will be held at the Qwest Auditorium.

Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, a process and project management consultancy and training firm. Mike specializes in helping companies adopt and improve their use of agile processes and techniques in order to build extremely high performance development organizations. He is the author of "Agile Estimating and Planning" and "User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development" as well as books on Java and C++ programming. With more than twenty years of experience, Mike has previously been a technology executive in companies of various sizes, from start-up to Fortune 40. He has also written articles for Better Software, IEEE Computer, Cutter IT Journal, Software Test and Quality Engineering, Agile Times, and the C/C++ Users Journal. Mike is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, is a founding member of the Agile Alliance, and serves on its board of directors. He is a Certified ScrumMaster Trainer and a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM. For more information, visit www.mountaingoatsoftware.com or email him at mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com.

Mountain Goat Software

• agile requirements gathering with user stories
• training and consulting on how to estimate agile projects
• training for agile project management
• the Scrum process