Training and Consulting Services

I received so many requests for assistance in helping others to achieve the same successes that I’ve enjoyed that I formalized a training plan for initiating an agile revolution in your company. If you are interested, please contact me and we’ll see if I can help.

Week One

Agile Principles and processes

• Agile Manifesto
• Underling principles of agile development
  • The thirteen principles
• Major agile schools of thought
  • Extreme Programming
  • Scrum
  • RUP
• Core agile practice overview
  • timeboxed development
  • feature-driven development
  • test-driven development
  • self-tasking teams
  • continuous refactoring
  • continuous integration
  • Co-located teams
  • Onsite customer (or proxy customer)

Goal: understand the history and principles behind agile development.

Project Intake Process

• The vision - build the box first
• The customer role
• Forming the team

Goal: Refine intake process to build strong, self-directing teams with a clear understanding of project goals.

Week Two

Agile Estimating and Planning

• Product backlog - user stories and use cases
• There are many users (Don’t just use “the user”). User’s don’t have to be roles. They can be people with different goals or perspectives.
• Write stories from the user’s point of view
  • The format I like: USER is able to DO SOMETHING in order to ACCOMPLISH A GOAL
  • A good story is Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Sized appropriately, Testable (INVEST) - Bill Wake and Mike Cohn
• Turning client requests into user stories
  • Ron Jeffries’ 3Cs - Card (the story), Conversation (the details), Confirmation (run acceptance tests)
• The conversation can spawn substories
• What is a use case?
  • Has title, actor, main success scenario, and extensions.
• The difference between a use case and a user story: A use case documents an agreement about a feature between the customer and developers. A user story is simply a promise to have a conversation about the feature.
• Why user stories? A conversation is more likely to lead to a satisfactory product than a documented requirement.
• Estimating Stories
  • Ideal time
  • PERT (Best + 4xExpected + Worst)
  • Story Points
• Planning Poker
• Story prioritization
  • 1, 2, 3
  • Low, Medium, High
  • MoSCoW
• Release planning
• Iteration backlog

Goal: learn to effectively and efficiently determine deliverables, priorities, and reasonable timelines.

Agile Tracking

• Burndown charts
• Project tracker
• Velocity
• Daily Scrum
  • Pigs and Chickens
• Tracking tools
  • Wikis
  • Trac
  • Xplanner
  • ActiveCollab

Goal: learn to implement agile tools for rapid feedback on team performance.

Week Three

Agile Quality Control

• Code reviews
• Pair programming
• The tester/programmer relationship
• Test driven development
• Automated testing tools
  • rUnits
  • Fitness
  • Selenium

Goal: learn agile methods for maintaining code quality for enhanced product stability and reduced maintenance costs.

Retrospectives

• How to run an agile retrospective and turn observations into action items.
  • Structure of the retrospective

Goal: learn to learn. A process for continual improvement.