Agile Boot Camp: Practitioner’s Real-World Solutions

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While not a silver bullet, Agile Methodologies are quickly becoming the most practical way to create outstanding software. Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean, Dynamic Systems Development Method, Feature Driven Development and other methods each have their strengths. While there are significant similarities that have brought them together under the Agile umbrella, each method brings unique strengths that can be utilized for your team success. Rarely do organizations adopt one methodology in its pure form. Rather success is achieved by combining the best practices, creating a hybrid approach. The only way to Agile success is practice. Agile is an art more than a science. The art of Agile must be practiced and finely tuned over multiple iterations. In this three-day Agile Boot Camp you will put the knowledge, skills, tools and techniques taught to work. The classroom will be broken up into Agile teams and your expert instructor will drive each team through the Agile process from Vision down to Daily planning and execution. Your instructor will answer questions with real world experience, as all of our instructors have Agile experience “in the trenches.” This three-day class is set up in pods/teams. Each team looks like a real-world development unit in Agile with Project Manager/Scrum Master, Business Analyst, Tester and Development. The teams will work through the Agile process including Iteration planning, Product road mapping and backlogging, estimating, user story development iteration execution, and retrospectives by working off of real work scenarios. Specifically, you will: • Practice how to be and develop a self-organized team • Create and communicate a Product Vision • Understand your customer and develop customer roles and personas • Initiate the requirements process by developing user stories and your product backlog • Put together product themes from your user stories and establish a desired product roadmap • Conduct story point estimating to determine effort needed for user stories to ultimately determine iteration(s) length • Take into consideration assumed team velocity with story point estimates and user story priorities to come up with you release plan • Engage the planning and execution of your iteration(s) • Conduct retrospectives after each iteration • Run a course retrospective to enable an individual plan of execution on how to conduct Agile in your environment Who Should Attend? Because this is an immersion course and the intent is to engage in the practices every Agile team will employ, this course is recommended for all team members responsible for delivering outstanding software. That includes, but is not limited to, the following roles: What You Will Learn • Practice and maintain a regular cadence when delivering working software each iteration • Follow the team approach; start as a team, finish as a team • Gain knowledge and understanding of Agile principles with context on why they are so important for each team • Embrace planning from Vision down to Daily level, recognizing the value of continuous planning over following a plan • Build a backlog of prioritized stories that provides emergent requirements for analysis that also fosters customer engagement and understanding • Engage in more effective estimating (story points) and become more accurate by being less precise • Pull together Agile release plans that connect you back to business expectations – including hard date commitments and fixed price models • Apply Agile testing strategies based on unit and acceptance testing, which creates a bottom up confirmation that your software works • Avoid the top mistakes made when rolling out Agile practices and how to craft an adoption strategy that will work in your organizational culture Dates and Locations For the dates and locations of these short courses, please see below: 5/2-4/2012, San Diego, CA 5/9-11/2012, Philadelphia, PA 5/14-16/2023, Phoenix, AZ 5/16-18/2012, Washington, DC 5/23-25/2012, Houston, TX 6/6-8/2012, Cleveland, OH 6/13-15/2012, Chicago, IL 6/18-20/2012, Columbia, MD 6/25-27/2012, Baltimore, MD 6/27-29/2012, Kansas City, MO 7/23-25/2012, Boston, MA 7/30-1/2012, Reston, VA 8/8-10/2012, San Diego, CA 8/27-29/2012, St Louis, MO The Agile Boot Camp is a perfect place for cross functional “teams” to become familiar with Agile methods and learn the basics together. It’s also a wonderful springboard for team building & learning. Bring your project detail to work on in class.