Training

Agile Fundamentals Training – 2 days

The Agile Fundamentals Training introduces developers, QA, business analysts, product management, project managers, and managers to Agile Delivery methods. In this workshop you will learn the Agile Values and Principles, providing deep understanding required to help your team succeed.

You will explore the practices of Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and Extreme Programming (XP).

This training is highly interactive with many hands-on exercises for applying the theory and concepts as they are introduced. Using these interesting and fun exercises, the participants explore various Agile practices, helping to deepen their understanding of the concepts.

The training is 2 days in length, and can be tailored to your organization’s goals and needs. This course is eligible for Project Management Institute (PMI) PDUs.

Course Overview

• The Agile Manifesto Values and Principles
• Outcomes of using Agile
• Common Agile myths
• Getting to “Done”
• Product and Iteration backlogs
• Multitasking and minimizing work in progress (WIP)
• Scrum events:
  • The Sprint
  • Sprint Planning
  • Daily Scrum
  • Sprint Review
  • Sprint Retrospective
• Scrum roles:
  • ScrumMaster
  • Product Owner
  • Development Team
• Scrum artifacts:
  • Product Backlog
  • Sprint Backlog
  • Increment
• Teams
  • Self‐organizing teams
  • Cross functional
  • Co-located
• Agile Requirements:
  • User stories and use case principles
  • Refining the Product Backlog
  • Splitting requirements into small pieces
  • Using Story Maps to organize the Product Backlog
• Estimating techniques; planning poker
• Project tracking and velocity
• Engineering practices required for sustainable Agile success
• Managing team and project impediments Defect management
• Documentation on Agile projects
• Team rooms and information radiators
• Tools and Agile
• Metrics

Agile Requirements Training – 2 Days

The Agile Requirements Training introduces the business, business analysts, product management, project managers, and managers to describing product and project needs using Agile techniques.

This workshop is highly interactive and hands on, applying the theory and concepts as they are introduced. It goes into detail about the process of creating and managing User Stories, and how User Stories can be used with other forms of requirements.

Objectives

Students will come away from the course with concrete skills for creating User Stories, splitting requirements into actionable stories, and an overview of estimation practices.

Course Overview

• Introduction to User Stories
• Traditional Requirement Techniques and User Stories:
  • Requirements
  • Use Cases
  • User Stories - That what and the why
• Kano model
• Story Splitting Techniques
• Refining the Product Backlog
• Ordering Product Backlog Items
• Using Story Maps to organize the backlog
• Acceptance Criteria using Specification by Example
• A common language across the business, coding, and testing
• Executable specifications
• Estimating techniques; planning poker
• Exercise with problems provided by the attendees

Executive Introduction to Agile – 1 day

Suitable for executives, directors, and managers that wish to understand the fundamentals of Agile processes and the value that Agile could bring to your organization.

This course focuses on understanding how Agile teams work and some of the considerations when transforming an organization to Agile. This is a very interactive course, offering in depth discussion around a number of challenging organizational topics.

Course Overview

• Introduction to Agile principles
  • The value of Agile
  • Background and roots of Agile
  • The Agile Manifesto
• The Agile Process
  • Iterative development
  • Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective activities
  • Product and iteration backlogs
• Just what is a ScrumMaster and a Product Owner
• Release planning and project tracking
• Portfolio management and planning
• How Agile may challenge your organizational culture
• What is involved in leading change
• Human Resources considerations
• Real estate considerations
• How Agile fits into an organizational change and how to lead such a change
• How does Agile fit with policies and governance

Agile Technical Practices Training – 2 days

Our Agile Technical Practices Workshop is intended for software developers, testers and any members of a project team who have an interest in improving code and system quality.

The attendees are introduced to concepts such as automated unit testing, refactoring, test-driven development (TDD), SOLID object-oriented design principles, and continuous integration. They will learn how to use testing to drive the design of their code, and how to use the unit tests to assist in their refactoring efforts.

The workshop is 2 days in length, and can be tailored to your organization’s particular goals and needs. An optional 3rd day can be added to this workshop in which students bring their own issues and code to which the techniques they have learned can be applied with the instructor available for hands-on assistance.

This course is available for Java, C#, C and C++.

Course Overview

• “Code Smells”
• Introduction to Refactoring
• Introduction to xUnit testing frameworks:
  • JUnit for Java
  • NUnit for C# and .NET
  • CPPUTest for C
  • GoogleTest for C++
• Supporting Refactoring with Unit Tests
• Test Doubles – Stub, Fakes, and Mocks
• Tools for Mocking:
  • JMock, Mockito for Java
  • NMock, EasyMock.NET for C#
  • CPPUTest or Opmock for C
  • GoogleMock for C++
• The Test-Code-Refactor Cycle of Test-Driven Development (TDD)
• Designing by Tests
• Design Patterns and Refactoring
• The SOLID object-oriented design principles
• Continuous Integration
• Automated Builds
• Group work on a sample problem

Quite simply this is a get to know us visit. We’ll chat with you for an hour or so and give you an short introduction to agile. If we can arrange it we will stop by your office. We are based in Ottawa, Ontario, however we are most often working on the road and might be in your city.

You will see if our services and our people can meet your needs. If you feel we cannot help, the investment is small, and, we may be able to refer you to other experienced people. Perhaps we can help you in which case we will have more to talk about.

This presentation is suitable for executives, directors, and managers that are in charge of projects and wish to bring some timeliness, value, and quality to the deliverables. This short presentation talks about the value that Agile can bring to a project and organization. This is not your standard presentation. No PowerPoint here; just a whiteboard and some good discussion around your questions.