The need for a course for Scrum developers :
If you’ve been following my series of recent blog posts entitled Agile Lessons Learned you might of seen some repetitive patterns emerge, mostly about the need for proper engineering practices. In my mind, engineering practices compose the first pillar underneath the success of any Agile teams. You could have the best Scrum process in the world, but if you do not have the technical skills to support the process, you’ll never have a productive software development team. The name of the game here is working software. If you’re not constantly delivering working software sprint after sprint and a good quantity of it I might add, you are doing something wrong. It all starts with clean code that works. Clean code makes maintenance easier. It makes the addition of new team members easier. It makes documenting the code almost a non-issue. Being confronted to quality software, new members are most likely to bring up the quality of their work up a notch than when presented with sloppy code. Quality triggers more quality. Sloppiness triggers more sloppiness.
Inadequate training sources
But how do you start right ? You could buy a few books here and there and spend a couple of months trying to grasp what you can. You go back and take a few semesters worth of evening courses. Your spouse and kids may not approve of that though. I also wish you luck finding teachers who teach software engineering practices like TDD. A quicker way might be to try and immerse yourself within an already Agile team that has awesome engineering practices in place already. Your boss and spouse might not be too anxious about you leaving your job though. What’s left then ? Well up until now you were pretty much on your own.
Introducing the Scrum.org courses
Being part of Pyxis, I’m extremely proud to see that we’ve partnered with Scrum.org to give the Scrum Developer Classes starting June 7th to June 11th. The first edition will be given in .Net. During the 5 day course, developers of all levels will be totally immersed in a Scrum environment and coached through the whole process by our Agile engineering experts. During those 5 days, attendees will be presented the latest tools of the Microsoft ecosystem(Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server , T-SQL, etc) and the latest in engineering best practices(TDD, Agile Database Development, Emerging Architecture, etc) . They will also go through the cycles of real Scrum iterations, just like Scrum teams developing production software. They will even be coached about addressing team dysfunctions! It is my firm belief that this kind of exposition to the best practices is the best way to get the real feeling of what it is like to be an Agile developer. I also believe that this will be beneficial to the teammates of attendees who have been exposed to the industry’s current best practices and latest tools. Finally, this course will lead attendees to get the Scrum Professional Certification. I can’t wait to follow these classes. Hope to see you there. It’ll be tons of fun. Excited about becoming a certified Scrum professional ? Here are some details about these classes : For a complete course description : Description Here is the syllabus : Scrum Developer .Net Syllabus -Nicholas Lemay
