Here are links to my slides.

Agile Analysis for Developers

Agile Architecture for Developers

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Let me clear a couple of things up about the CSD program.  For full disclosure, I’m on staff with the Scrum Alliance helping administer the program.

Firstly, focusing on the CSD is a little short sighted.  Certified Scrum Developer is the first training program in the new Scrum Alliance Registered Education Provider program (SA-REP) http://www.scrumalliance.org/SA-REP.  The Scrum Alliance is seeking applications from training organizations that have something to offer the Scrum community.  There are 10 organizations listed right now and several more are in the final stages of approval, including a branch of a major university.  These organizations are screened for experience and demonstrated expertise in developing and administering training programs.   The application process also reviews the resume of each course designer and trainer submitted by the applying organization.  Lastly each course is reviewed relative to the leaning objectives for the program.  Once a new SA-REP is approved and they have approved courses and trainers they are given the ability to list public courses on the Scrum Alliance site.

The SA-REP program is also setting up to assess and review the courses and trainers that deliver training in the program.   The details of how this will be administered is still under development, however the goal is to help improve the quality of training and give students they information they need to select training that is valuable to them.

The CSD program is an SA-REP program.  Every SA-REP that submits a course and trainers for CSD-Eligible status are reviewed as I described.  The program includes Scrum knowledge as well as an aggressive set of technical learning objectives for developers working on Scrum teams.  These include the practices of Test-First, Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Agile Analysis and Agile Architecture.

So far we have 2 Java based programs approved and one .NET.  We have applications currently being reviewed for Ruby and another Java program.   There are training opportunities currently available on four continents.

With the massive improvements in Visual Studio 2010 and the new Application Lifecycle Management abilities of the new Microsoft Tools the Scrum Alliance is seeking qualified and experienced trainers on the platform.  This why the application asks if the trainer is qualified in this area thought the programs listed.  The application process reviews the Scrum training ability and experience of all applicants and if any trainer does not have demonstrated experience in Scrum, the Scrum Alliance will work with the organization to partner with an experienced Scrum trainer to help them with that part of the program.

BTW, I don’t see any “festering money-grubbers” listed as SA-REPs.  Who are you referring to?    I see qualified, experienced training organizations offering much needed training for developers and other professionals working on Scrum teams.

If you have any other questions about the SA-REP or CSD programs, feel free to contact me directly.

Rod Claar
SA-REP /CSD Program Community Liaison
rclaar@scrumalliance.org

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ABOUT RIPPLEROCK

RippleRock formed in 2009 with the mission to assist customers drive dramatic improvements in their software development capability. The Company applies expertise across the full lifecycle; facilitating organizational transformation to enable Agile practices, all the way down to improving engineering practices within the teams.

The team at RippleRock has a strong track record in the Agile space, coming together from various organizations in the industry to bring together a new company unheard of in the Agile consulting space.  As a specialist in this area, the Company also offers access to the most experienced Agile coaches, trainers and consultants with a particular mix of skills required to work with people, process, organizations and tools.

RippleRock has bases of operation in the UK and US and travel to Europe and India as part of engagements.

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The first and most obvious is the impact of faster release cycles.  There are many things that Agile teams do to achieve faster release cycles, but the primary driving reasons are faster return on investment and quicker feedback.   In my experience the product management team are often not prepared for the high level of interaction that the Agile team will demand.  Even if they had prepared well in traditional terms, the depth of detail that will be required by the Agile team will outpace the product management team and make it harder for them to prepare the vision and business capability plan for the next release.  When the development team delivers early with fewer problems and the product managers are not ready to reload the team poor decisions on what to do next often result.  Then scrambling to fill the gap the desired feedback can be passed over leading to more bad decisions.  The cycle is almost unstoppable without a significant change in product management and market research practices.

The next common goal of an Agile team is continuous shippablity.   An organization delivering more reasonable  scope, quality higher and a robust base of automated tests, sooner or later someone will ask why we can’t just ship it to meet a new market, for a special customer or to beat the competition.   This is like having a 225 m.p.h. car and trying to get it up to speed wearing a blindfold.  You might get lucky, but more often you will be off the road very quickly.  A few years ago when working at a software company, sales asked us to adapt our product to a different market.  The engagement was a total disaster.  We did not take time to understand what this new market wanted.  Our brains were tuned to our normal market and could not understand the context and the paradigms in place in the new market.

In both of these scenarios what is missing is more information about the customer and how they use the product.  Traditional market research can deliver the answers, but it takes a lot of time and generally a lot of money.    Some products can support the cost of the market research, but many medium to small organizations cannot afford formal market research.  Trying to go to market without having the knowledge of how customer will use the product can sink even the best product.

What  is required are techniques to get the market research to make good product planning decisions in pace with the development team.  The Agile planning cycles of iteration, release, vision, roadmap and portfolio need to match up with processes that answer the questions about near-term product improvements, product evolution and other markets.

If we could lower the cost of market research and product planning while still delivering valuable and accurate results, we would have a better shot at delivering the best value to our customers as fast as possible.  This is the true promise of Agile.

Recently I had the opportunity to attend Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games® Consultant Master Class in San Ramon, California at the Chevron campus.  The class was held in Chevron’s Innovation Space and attended by 20 or so of the smartest Agilests on the planet.   This class was aimed at helping this group of world-class consultants understand how Innovation Games® can be used to deliver cost-effective market research for the Agile team.

Luke is a great facilitator and this two days was packed with great concepts and practices.  He and his company is on a mission to restore the concept of serious games to business.  The idea of serious games was all but destroyed by computer games and online gaming.   Serious games are still fun but have a purpose.

Luke told us that “Innovation Games® are serious games that power innovation by enabling you to better understand your customers”.

With the knowledge and skills gained from this class we will immediately start offering a new course “Innovation Games® for Agile Teams”. This course will contain some lecture but will be predominantly discussion and hands-on exercises to help you understand how Innovation Games® can be used by Agile organizations to help provide the right vision and feature set to the development team and in turn your customers.

Agile teams who employ Innovation Games® find some of the dull and repetitive practices of Agile comes alive in a fun and engaging way.  Scenarios might include:

• Using Product Box to identify customer requirements.
• Using Speed Boat to improve retrospectives.
• Using Buy A Future to prioritize the product backlog.
• Planning a project using Remember the Future.
• Clarify the release plan with Prune the Product Tree.
• Understanding how your product is used through Me and My Shadow and Start Your Day.

Each student will receive a copy of Luke’s book Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play.

Course Outline

• Overview of Innovation Games®
• Customer Collaboration
• Continuous Planning
• Portfolio Prioritization
• Product Backlog Prioritization
• Strategic Planning
• Release Planning
• Agile Retrospectives

Audience

All members of an Agile team are invited to join us with a focus on product planning and management.

Format

Standard - 1 day.

Extended - 2 day with more game played by participants.

Schedule

The course is available for on-site delivery and will be offered as a public course.

For more details see http://effectiveagiledev.com/ or call 530-SCRUM-42.

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You can see the video here:

How to create record and playback Test Cases in Visual Studio Beta2

This new central place for QA teams to create and manage test plans and tests is a great addition to Visual Studio for traditional QA teams.  However my primary interest is in how could an Agile team use this new tool to move testing forward in the Agile process.

Firstly I think that this tool could be a good place for Product Owners and Test Professionals to collaborate on the Acceptance Tests for an upcoming iteration.  The User Stories could be the basis for creating the actual test cases that would be used to validate the delivery of the anticipated business value from the User Story.

During Sprint (Iteration) planning the team could use the test case to understand the intent of the story and get clear on what the real acceptance criteria is.  I would expect that more detail and more tests would be added during the planning session as clarity is improved.

While working the story in the Sprint the team would continue to update the tests with recorded steps of the newly developed feature and run the acceptance tests to monitor the Sprint progress.

When the Acceptance Tests all passed, the User Stories would be functionally complete and they would provide a safety net for performance tuning, refactoring and integration.

I hope you have noticed that I am completely ignoring the coded automation of the Acceptance Tests.  I am a big proponent of automating Acceptance Tests.  However in my experience the road to fully automated Acceptance Tests starts with understanding the process of writing the Acceptance Tests and the Agile team using them to drive development.

I’m sure I will come back to the topic of Automated Acceptance Tests later, but if your team is looking for an easy way to get your QA professionals involved in your Agile team, using Visual Studio Test and Lab Manager to author Acceptance Tests is a great place to start!

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