Posts Tagged ‘practices’

ANN: Agile Software Engineering Practices training by Isráfíl Consulting

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

Isráfíl Consulting is finally prepared for the first series of its Agile Software Engineering Practices training courses. This series is offered in partnership with Berteig Consulting who are graciously hosting the registration process. Their team has also helped greatly in shaping the presentation style and structure of the course. The initial run will be in Ottawa, Toronto (Markham), and Kitchener/Waterloo.   

Topics covered will include Test Driven Development (TDD), testability, supportive infrastructure such as build and continuous integration, team metrics, incremental design and evolutionary architecture, dependency injection, and so much more. (This course won’t present the planning side of XP, but covers many other aspects common to XP projects) It makes a great complement for training in Agile Processes such as XP, Scrum, or OpenAgile. The overview slide presentation is available for free download from the Isráfíl web site.

The courses are scheduled for:

The course is $1250 CAD per student, and participants receive a transferrable discount of $100 CAD for other training with Berteig Consulting as a part of our ongoing partnership. I initially prototyped this course in Ottawa this December, and am very excited to see this through in several locales. Class size is limited to 15, so we can keep the instruction style more involved. The above schedules are linked to Berteig Consulting’s course system and have registration links at the bottom of the description. Locations are TBD, but will be updated at the above links as soon as they’re finalized.

A further series is planned for several US cities in March, and we’ll be sure to announce them as well.

Comprehensive List of Agile Practices

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

This might be impossible, but I was thinking that it would be cool to have a single reference of all the possible agile practices.  Obviously, since “agile” is not a single defined method, we must take the word “comprehensive” with a bit of humor (or a grain of salt).  I’ve attached a spreadsheet that represents my first draft (it’s in OpenOffice.org format so that you don’t have to worry about me spreading viruses – if you want it in MS Office format, email me at mishkin@berteigconsulting.com).  I’ve split the practices up into several sections including: “Agile Skeleton”, “Common Practices”, “Basic Scrum Practices”, “Optional Scrum Practices”, “Extreme Programming Practices” and “Lean Practices”.  I’ve stopped there because I’m not an expert on other agile methods such as Crystal, Agile Unified Process or Feature Driven Development.  I imagine that this list will be useful for teams to do self-assessment and to think about ways they might improve.  Perhaps it could be used in a retrospective setting.  Berteig Consulting coaches use something similar to this to assess the effectiveness of their engagement with clients.  If you think of practices I’ve missed or other potential uses for a list like this, let me know in the comments.  My intention is to convert this to a wiki and make it available under a Creative Commons license once it is a little more refined.

Agile Practices List (OpenOffice format – 68KB)