Leaders

• You want to be able to enhance your software products with creative, innovative features.

• You don’t want to lose your team for a whole week of training.

Teams

• You want to build software in a sane, professional, personally enriching, value-generating environment.

• You also want to hone your skills and those of your teammates.
  

For software development, “going Agile” isn't enough. Self-organization isn't enough.

In order to produce highly valuable software with high quality now, and in the future, developer practices have to change. Teams need to be ready to make ongoing changes without breaking any existing features. This requires experience with highly iterative and incremental Agile developer practices.

Rob Myers works with your team, in your offices, on your product backlog; immersing the team in the type of real-world programming environment that he has experienced on numerous highly successful Agile teams.

 The result will be better software right now! No waiting for the team to make the leap from classroom to team space. The ROI begins immediately.

Upon completion of this week-long workshop, attendees with 12 months of experience on a Scrum team may qualify for the Scrum Alliance’s Advanced Certified Scrum Developer® certification.

“How is this similar to your other complete A-CSD courses?”

We cover the same topics, including all of the CSD and A-CSD learning objectives. We may occasionally do an isolated lab to focus on one particular challenge, before applying that knowledge to your daily work. Each attendee is given our standard CSD/A-CSD workbooks.

“How is this course unique?”

Attendees don't merely practice on a sample lab, but they will immediately apply the learning to their actual work. We may often ignore a section of the workbook in favor of this hands-on approach.

Topics will be covered on demand. For example, the typical A-CSD course covers all Scrum events on the first day, and saves tech practices for the other three days. In this workshop, we’ll cover the Scrum events as they occur, and cover most technical practices as the need becomes evident.

Depending on the team’s needs, experiences, and challenges—as determined by Rob and the team during the course—your team may settle upon various comprehensive combinations of practices in order to be successful. Leaders won’t need to choose which particular practices will be used up front; but they will get to enjoy the benefits of these new ways of working.

Options

Kanban:

“Doubly Extreme Agile”: We start with a review of Kanban basics, and then work on your next work-item/request, e.g., using Behavior Driven Development, Mob Programming (now often called Ensemble Programming), Refactoring, and Continuous Deployment.

Scrum:

“Enhanced Scrum”: We start with a review of Scrum basics, hold a lightweight planning session, then operate the rest of the course as a sprint, including review and retrospective. The team will adopt the set of practices needed to successfully complete your PBIs/User-Stories. E.g., Test-Driven Development, Pairing, Refactoring, and Continuous Integration.

Developers who successfully complete this course—and have 12 months of documented work on a Scrum team—may qualify to receive certification for Scrum Alliance’s Advanced Certified Scrum Developer® (A-CSD). Others on the team might at least qualify for Scrum Alliance’s Certified Scrum Developer® (CSD), depending on how they are able to interact, and how much time they spend, with the developers during the week. This is up to the instructor and the individual team member.

Technical Environments:

Typically the course is delivered in a way that is generalized for any software development environment. The course can be taught in multiple programming languages at the same time, as long as developer preferences are known well in advance.

The course can also be oriented towards the following technologies:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS): Labs will be oriented towards AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) and ways to develop your Lambda functions test-first.

• Test-first with React.js or Angular: JavaScript or TypeScript only.

Objectives

• Get something done, to offset the costs of setting aside a week for training.

• A variety of individual practices; and how they improve team communication, product quality, and maintainability. Includes Continuous Integration, Test-Driven Development, Pair Programming, and many others.

• A clear understanding of why our industry needs professional development & engineering practices.

• A clear understanding of why these particular practices are well-suited for Agile frameworks such as Scrum & Kanban.

• Techniques for teams and individuals to realistically stick to these practices in a disciplined way.

Learn more about these capabilities here: Frequently Asked Questions about Agile Technical Skills

Audience

Software developers, lead programmers, and architects. Participants will split into teams of 4-6 people who can read and understand the programming language selected by that team. Each participant will be working closely with others to craft real code.

Prerequisites

• Dev-team availability. Whole team preferred. Access to product/BAs/testers may be necessary at various times during the week.

• Familiarity with an Agile framework such as Scrum, XP, or Kanban.