When does class start/end?
Classes begin promptly at 9:00 am, and typically end at 5:00 pm.
Plan Your Agile Transition Strategy After considering all of the ways in which the Agile methods will affect your organization and considering the benefits and challenges associated with each, you...
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Plan Your Agile Transition Strategy
After considering all of the ways in which the Agile methods will affect your organization and considering the benefits and challenges associated with each, you are ready to plan your Agile adoption strategy. Which steps should you take first? Who will need to be involved? How will you capitalize on the benefits you will experience? In this course you will gain all the tools, skills and knowledge to return to your office and successfully implement an Agile transition strategy that best fits your environment.
Easy to Implement Training
Each concept and technique covered in this course is discussed not only in theory, but will also cover how the information works in practice. Each section will encompass the most important information that you need to know in order to be prepared to put this knowledge to use, and then will be followed with hands-on exercises to demonstrate precisely how to implement it. Each of the sections will also include a discussion around best practices for transitioning, and implementation to help participants avoid the pitfalls commonly encountered when making the change to an Agile approach.
Where Agile Methods Can Help the Organization
There are significant benefits available when utilizing an Agile approach that can address the risks, unknowns, and uncertainties that affect nearly all software development projects. These complexities can best be addressed with a flexible and adaptable model that turns traditional problems into advantages and provides the tools to change the way work is done through addressing organizational issues head on. In this course you will experience, through hands-on exercises, how Agile addresses these traditional project challenges and finally resolve these ever-present constraints. Learn to overcome these hurdles and interweave your traditional practices with Agile practices to develop the best software for your organization and your customer.
This course is valuable for anyone who is contemplating making their software projects more agile.
Agility is comprised of a unique set of principles and values that must be understood and embraced before the organization can employ Agile practices. In this section, we will survey the essence of Agility.
The heart of every project is the team. Yet in traditional approaches, the team often operates as a collection of competing individuals, rather than as a unit. Even worse, many organizations have divided responsibilities in ways that pit different groups against each other, when the project desperately needs cooperation. Agility means establishing a single team for each project, and ensuring that it comprises all of the necessary people. Agile practices ensure that all team members are constantly collaborating and driving the project toward success.
Traditional approaches are often referred to as “plan-based” because of the importance they put on up-front planning and then controlling the project so it conforms to the plan. Of course, some organizations go to the other extreme, paying little attention to their plans after the project starts, or even foregoing planning altogether. Agility means planning just enough, doing that planning when it is needed, and accepting the fact that reality often works out differently from our plans. Agile projects value achieving the project goals; the plan is merely a tool to help them do that.
Traditional approaches usually begin with an important (and sometimes long and drawn out) Requirements phase during which all of the product requirements are elicited, analyzed and documented. Everyone in the project commits to the resulting specification, and then significant effort is expended in Change Control. Conformance to the Requirements Specification becomes the measure of project success. (Until the customer complains!) Agility means documenting requirements just enough, eliciting more detailed information when it is needed, and accepting the fact that thing will change before the project is over. Agile projects value delivering what the customer needs; the requirements are merely a tool to help them do that.
Traditional projects are often quality-challenged. The testing phase at the end of the project seems to be never-ending, and in spite of all that time and effort, a defective product is delivered. This results in high support costs, unhappy customers and out of control costs. Agility means keeping the focus on quality from the very beginning of the project, testing continuously and ensuring that every piece of code is technically excellent. And because testing is not saved for the end, quality surprises are eliminated. Agility means producing production-ready software regularly throughout the project!
There is too much to Agility for you to adopt all at once, so you will need an action plan. In this section, you will review what we have covered in the course and prepare a viable action plan for your organization to become more Agile.