A prioritized user story backlog helps to understand what to do next, but is a difficult tool for understanding what your whole system is intended to do. A user story map arranges user stories into a useful model to help understand the functionality of the system, identify holes and omissions in your backlog, and effectively plan holistic releases that delivery value to users and business with each release.

How do you know you are ready to start iterating? In some cases, very little is needed before the first iteration. In other cases, rushing to iterate (because you were told to) can lead to weeks of time wasted overly focused on delivering a poorly understood product.

In this presentation by David Hussman titled Getting Ready to Produce at Agile Mumbai 2010 Conference, David provides concrete tools for discovering your product context and assessing whether you are ready to start building and / or iterating. Participants learned tools for defining how much process you need and tools for truly understanding what you are building and why, as well as who will use it, why they will (or will not) use it and why.

10 years after the introduction of agile methods, many communities are succeeding in their adoption while others are struggling or failing. Why? Many struggle because agile methods were introduced in an overly prescriptive manner. People were told to follow a set of practices instead of learning to use the agile practices and values to amplify their existing strengths and address their challenges.

In this talk, David Hussman shares successful coaching techniques he uses to grow sustainable agility that lasts beyond the early iterations or the first few agile projects. David begins with a series of tools to help you build a solid foundation: assessments, pragmatic practice selection, chartering and product planning tools. He then moves on to discuss ideas for finding a groove of discover and delivery that is best suited to your project community.

As a full time working coach, David uses coaching stories and experiences to discuss establishing strong cadence while also building the essence of coaching and coaches in your community Whether you are new to agile methods or you are a seasoned players, this session will help you grow your coaching skills and your ability to truly discover and deliver real value.

In this 60 mins tutorial presented by Tarang Baxi, Chirag Doshi and Dhaval Doshi at the Agile Mumbai 2010 conference, he demonstrates and discusses various business analysis anti-patterns, particularly as they apply to and impact agile projects. These anti-patterns range from BA behavior with customers to BA behavior with their own team members.

At the Agile Bengaluru 2010 conference, Sai Venkatakrishnan and Harikrishnan express their concern on the monotony that has crept into the way we develop application and how it affects us being Agile.

We follow agile, but are the systems we are building Agile?

A case study presented by Siddharta Govindaraj at the Agile Bengaluru 2010 Conference describing a period of 6 years in two startup companies that he was involved with.

The first part covers the period from 2004 to 2006 when Sidd was working with a startup based out of Singapore. He explains how we moved from doing ad-hoc development to adopting Scrum. Adopting Scrum was a big improvement over our previous ad-hoc approach but Scrum also led them to make some classic mistakes (from a lean point of view).

The second part covers the period from 2007 to 2009 when Sidd started his own company in India. The company was started with Scrum right from the beginning. He explains how we evolved from vanilla Scrum to Lean and Kanban.

At the Agile Mumbai 2010, Mahesh Baxi takes you through an exciting journey of key lessons learned from one of the largest agile projects executed at ThoughtWorks which will cover:

• Key agile principles
• What challenges comes along with the scale of up to 200+ people with added complexity of distributed location
• How is it different from other agile projects in terms of planning ahead, release plans, scope management, infrastructure
• Communication – The most important ingredient for large scale agile projects to be successful
• What kind of team structure would work best?
• How to stay focused? How to identify bottlenecks and work through them

At the Agile Bengaluru 2010 conference, Jann Thomas discusses and identifies ways in which agile enablers can facilitate the transition to Agile practices. She covered basic Agile practices as well as techniques for introducing them to the software delivery team. She also presents common software delivery problems and the Agile path to solutions.

During the Agile Bengaluru 2010 conference, J.B. Rainsberge, in his Keynote highlights the top 10 things he wished people would stop doing on Software Projects.