Day 1: Agile Project Management Workshop (Dec. 14, 2009): This workshop focuses on the framework and overall process needed to run an agile project. Subjects include product envisioning, feature identification and prioritization, iteration planning, and project retrospectives. This session is great for whole project team members to attend and reach common understanding on an agile lifecycle.

Days 2-4: Agile Software Development Essentials (Dec. 15-17, 2009): This training focuses on the core agile software development principles and practices needed to make software less complex and more maintainable. The content is presented in a manner that is easily digested by developers, architects, testers, team leads and technical managers. Any team member with a conceptual understanding of object oriented development will gain value from this class.

Agile Project Management Workshop

Duration: 1-Day (9am-5pm)

Are you or your team pursuing a software lifecycle based on Scrum or Agile techniques? Then come to this hands-on workshop and learn how to use Agile/Scrum.

We have created a case study that takes a project through all phases of a Scrum lifecycle. You will join in the case study and apply the Agile techniques you will learn.

This course is great for the individual or for many team members to attend together. You can learn Agile together and prepare for your first Agile project. If you are a ScrumMaster, this is a great opportunity to bring your team to an affordable training session and quickly increase their knowledge and understanding of Scrum/Agile techniques.

For project managers, this course provides a solid demonstration of Agile principles. You will see Agile methods compared and contrasted to traditional project management techniques.

All attendees will take home a USB Drive loaded with course materials and a copy of the top-rated agile adoption book, Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World.

This hands on workshop will help you:

• Understand your role in a Scrum/Agile team
• Learn how to use Scrum and Agile within your company
• Learn techniques for prioritizing features
• Minimize waste by delivering functionality that is used
• Improve team buy-in for project objectives
• Adapt to discoveries during a project
• Plan and deliver value driven iterations
• Improve project delivery by increasing customer interaction
• Minimize project risk through status transparency
• Obtain templates and guides that you can use with your projects
• Determine which Agile practices your company/team is ready for

Course Topics:

• Understanding how Agile ties to the bottom line
• Identifying the best ideas in your project backlog
• Validating the feasibility of a project idea
• Identifying and prioritizing project features as a team
• Agile estimation techniques
• Creating release and iteration plans
• Best practices for development and testing
• Adapting to discoveries throughout a project
• Better understanding of project status through daily meetings and simple tools
• Delivery: Release plans, communication plans, and support plans
• Retrospectives for iterations and projects

Who should attend:

This course is invaluable to software project team members looking to understand Agile from a practical, real world perspective. Typical attendees include project managers, development managers, product managers, developers, analysts, team leads, testers, and executives. This course is also excellent for ScrumMasters who want to learn how to add agile practices into their existing Scrum framework. Experience with software projects is all that is needed.

Speaker:

Greg Smith is an Agile Coach and founder of GS Solutions Group. Greg is also an Agile Project Management instructor at Bellevue College.
Greg has over 15 years of experience as a program manager, project manager, business analyst,scrummaster, and product manager. Greg’s focus has been on iteratively migrating companies to Agile and actively involving the development team in the migration process. Greg is also co-author of Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World, producer of the Agile Adoption stage at the 2009 Agile Conference, and a volunteer for the PMI agile community of practice.

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Agile Software Development Essentials

Duration: 3-Days (9am-5pm)

In this unique training we cover the critical skills needed to build software that can easily change. We identify and give names to the qualities that make software flexible so all team members can communicate with high fidelity. We then look at specific principles and practices which support the development of quality software.

In addition to covering a core set of patterns every developer should know we also examine the forces that underlie patterns and make them valuable to agility. This expanded view of patterns gives attendees a powerful framework to allow them to encapsulate and abstract virtually any problem for maximum flexibility without overcomplicating the solution. These techniques apply equally well to new development as they do to maintaining or extending existing systems.

Attendees learn how to find elegant solutions by understanding the forces of problems. This leads to discovering the right abstractions that make software less complex and more manageable. Using advanced techniques like commonality-variability analysis, “refactoring to the open-closed”, encapsulating construction and pattern-oriented design, participants learn how to emerge designs just-in-time and with minimal waste.

There are no “magic bullets” in software development but developers can make better choices if they understand the tradeoffs of their decisions. This training helps attendees evaluate tradeoffs in design that can then be immediately applied to virtually any problem. This practical approach will impact the way attendees create software on a day to day basis. Participants leave this training confident and empowered to improve the quality of the software they produce.

This is a lecture-style course with a group exercise done at whiteboards.

After completing this training attendees will be able to:

• Identify six code qualities that make software easier to maintain
• Build a common vocabulary for evaluating and communicating designs
• Understand how applying key principles leads to easily extendible designs
• Evaluate the tradeoffs of alternate designs without having to code them
• Learn twelve core patterns that every developer should know and use
• See how to apply patterns just-in-time and avoid up-front overdesign
• Employ proven techniques to dramatically reduce defects
• Recognize pathologies of poor code and how to fix them
• Discover how to refactor code without breaking callers
• Master an easy way to find patterns in any problem

Who Should attend:

This training is for developers, testers, designers, architects, technical leads and managers of development teams. Attendees should be familiar with basic Object-Oriented (OO) concepts and terminology.

Course Topics:

Day 1

Introduction
Architecture and Design
CREATE Software Quality
Software Patterns
Encapsulating Varying Behavior

Day 2

Review
Paradigms, Principles and Perspectives
Encapsulating Foreignness
Group Exercise
Group Exercise Debrief

Day 3

Review
Core Practices
Encapsulating Sequence and Cardinality
Encapsulating Construction
Refactoring and Emerging Systems

Instructor:
One of the nation’s leading Agile Software Development Coaches, David Bernstein has personally trained more than 6,000 developers for several Fortune 500 companies over the course of his 30-year career in software development and multimedia. David is the creator of a wholesale bank-accounting software program that has become the de facto standard in major foreign-exchange banks across the globe as well as econometric software used to invest trillions of dollars. A longtime special consultant to IBM, he worked on the development of OS/2 and was a key programmer for IBM’s ImagePlus platform. As part of a special IBM technology-transfer task force, David trained IBM software engineers around the world, giving them the tools to write the next generation of applications and operating-system software, and earning one of the highest satisfaction ratings in the history of IBM corporate education. In 1998 he founded MicroSurfer Corporation, whose Web-productivity software attracted rave reviews from the technology press. Over the last 5 years, David has trained developers at Microsoft, Boeing, Real Networks, SunGard and many others. David is also an award-winning video producer who has created an MTV Earth Day Special and co-produced several shorts with his filmmaker wife, Staci Bernstein.

For more information contact:

David Bernstein 

Email: info@techniquesofdesign.com

Or Visit: http://www.techniquesofdesign.com

 Note: Seating is limited and this class is filling up.