An interactive ½ day workshop for Senior Management

A Predictable Software Development^TM process can significantly improve an organization's ability to deliver quality software on time, to meet customer expectations, and to improve employee satisfaction. In order to become more predictable, Management must play an active role in changing the culture. This half-day workshop provides Managers and Sr. Executives with proven techniques they can use to help their organizations become more predictable. These techniques can help you make more effective use of scarce engineering resources, reduce the number of costly bug-fix releases, balance issues of quality, features, and schedule, as well as people, product, and process. As a direct result, you will learn how to under-commit and over-deliver, and improve your bottom line.

An interactive full-day workshop for Software Project Teams

The increasing demand for complex software coupled with the inability of many organizations to write clear, concise requirements results in increased time to market, increased rework, and lower quality products - all of which negatively impacts your company's bottom line. Further, software project teams are often unable to accurately estimate and schedule the work they need to perform. As a result, Management frequently imposes delivery dates for new products. With the end date given, the project team is then forced to "schedule backwards". Schedules developed in this manner are always unrealistic since the project team must estimate task duration based on time available rather than time required. Since most companies provide little or no training in writing requirements, task estimating and project scheduling, it's not surprising that software projects are frequently delivered late, with fewer features than were promised, and with too many bugs. Many companies over-commit and under- deliver.

To address this problem organizations need to learn how to:

• write better requirements,
• prepare accurate estimates of required tasks based on those requirements,
• develop realistic schedules based on these estimates, and
• deliver promised features in promised time frame.

This full day workshop provides the skills your organization needs to learn how to under-commit and over-deliver. The morning session is devoted to understanding the importance of writing good requirements and specific skills need to accomplish this. The afternoon session is focused on estimating skills and scheduling best practices. Estimating techniques such as the Wideband Delphi Method are discussed as examples of ways to improve the accuracy of estimates. Scheduling practices such as the Yellow Sticky Method are presented as a tool that project teams can use to develop accurate estimates and build realistic schedules that can be met. Interactive exercises on estimating and scheduling are included to reinforce the discussion.

An interactive full-day workshop for project leads, SQA staff, and developers

In today's global economy, the product development cycle has shrunk from years to months. Many new products have software embedded within them. Companies are finding that the demand for products frequently exceeds their capacity to deliver. As a result, many organizations are make tradeoffs between product quality and time to market. While perfect software is not practical, delivering poor quality software can have a negative impact on both customers and suppliers. By the effective use of Software Verification & Validation techniques, companies can improve Quality, which lowers long term costs and increases profits, and help get products to market faster.