Is your development process predictable? Can you give a reliable answer to yourself or to your customers when will you be done implementing a specific feature? Do you deliver on time? Is your process under control? Do you successfully handle all urgent interventions and support requests, without jeopardizing the development of new features? If you have answered "No" to at least one of the questions above, we have some good and some bad news for you. The bad news is that the major cause of these problems are your conscious und unconscious decisions. The good news is that a solution exist and is within your grasp!

In this session we will explain the metrics necessary to get proper insights in the status of your development process and we will discuss how to visualize and interpret them. You will learn about process policies necessary to ensure a stable flow through the process and how tracking the most representative metrics helps to easily recognize irregularities and perform necessary adjustments to get the process under control. We will explain and through simulations clearly demonstrate how seemingly small changes in the way we behave in everyday development activities can have a significant impact on the process as a whole.

Having a predictable and reliable development process and being able to say when something will be done is the holy grail of software engineering. With metrics and techniques that we will discuss in this session, ensuring flow and predictability and reliably finishing on time will not be a miracle any more.