Training

While the “rules” of agile development are pretty simple, getting the most out of agile development is surprisingly complicated.  Make the most of your team and agile development by attending one of Adept Technologies courses or workshops on agile development.  All of these courses are available for on-site delivery, for class sizes from 6 to 12 students.

For information on any of these courses, contact Keith McMillan.

Courses

Agile Overview

This one-day course presents the fundamentals of agile development without a specific emphasis on the student’s day-to-day responsibility. It provides a good cross-discipline overview of agile for teams new to this style of development.

The Agile Overview course is day one of some of my other agile courses: Agile for Data Professionals, Agile for Software Architects, Agile for Business Partners, and Agile for Software Testers.

Agile for Data Professionals

This two-day course covers the fundamentals of agile development, then dives in to what it means to be agile from a data specialist’s point of view. Refactoring and continuous integration are great for your teammates writing Java or C# code, but how do you do that with DB2? Attend this two-day course and maximize your chances of success with agile and relational database technology.

Coming Soon!

Agile for Software Architects

Learn the techniques that will allow you to have the best of both worlds: a robust, scalable architecture, and the responsiveness of an agile approach.

Agile for Software Testers

Testing in an agile project presents challenges that you won’t find in a traditional project. This two-day course will teach you the techniques and strategies that will allow your team to successfully test software in an agile project.

Agile for Business Partners

Agile changes more than just the way the technologists work, it works best when we change the way management and customers work with an agile team as well.  Attending this two-day class will teach you how to get what you want from an agile development team, whether that’s an understanding of where they are and what’s next, or how to create and manage requirements for the features the team will build.

Workshops

These workshops place more emphasis on the student’s current workplace challenges. They typically consist of a segment reviewing the theory behind the topic, and then on real-world problems brought to class by the students. Students should come prepared with challenges they are currently facing in their day-to-day job.

Creating and Maintaining a Product Backlog

Scrum uses a product backlog to manage requirements, but where does the backlog come from? This workshop covers how to go from zero to backlog, and then how to care for the backlog once it’s been created. We’ll cover some common dysfunctions in the backlog, and how to remedy them. In the afternoon, students should bring along requirements or backlogs from their projects, and any challenges they’re facing in creating or maintaining the backlog, the class will discuss them.

Interpreting Burn-up and Burn-down Charts

As silly as it may seem to an outsider, Big Visible Charts are a crucial part of monitoring the health of a Scrum project. Whether it be a sprint burn-down, a release burn-up or a project burn-down, the burn charts should paint an accurate view of the team’s status.  In this workshop, we’ll review how to create burn-up and burn-down charts. We’ll look at some examples of burn charts anomalies, discuss what they might mean, and suggest some questions to get to the root of the matter.  In the afternoon, we’ll create burn-up and burn-down charts from any projects the students care to bring to class, and discuss their interpretations.

Creating an Agile Release Plan

Contrary to what some agile practitioners believe, agile teams can create release plans. They don’t necessarily resemble the Gantt charts we’ve become accustomed to, but in many ways, they’re far more realistic.  In this workshop, we’ll discuss how to create a release plan from a product backlog, and how to manage the release plan once the team starts work.  In the afternoon, students can bring in their backlogs from their projects, and the class will work on creating release plans as a group.

Requirements with User Stories

User stories are a strange beast to many business analysts. How can a team work with such a simple statement of features and still be successful? By attending this workshop, you’ll gain an appreciation of what makes a good user story, and what makes a bad one. In the afternoon, students are encouraged to bring user stories from their projects, and the class will discuss how to improve them.

Test Driven Development (TDD) using Java

Test driven development is an agile practice that originated with Extreme Programming (XP). This one day workshop is intended for developers, consists of teaching the fundamentals of the test-code-refactor cycle by hands-on development of tests for simple Java programs. This course is for experienced Java developers. (Java is a registered trademark of Oracle)

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