Seminars
 
 
 

We offer on-site seminars to organizations interested in
learning more about XP and agile software development

  
 
Title:

XP and Lean Software Development - What Managers Need to Know

Duration: 1 to 1.5 hours
Intended Audience: Managers responsible for return on software engineering effort.
Assumptions:The audience is composed of people who are more interested in why XP produces results than in the details of its software practices.
Program Synopsis: The reasons why XP (Extreme Programming) works can be found in the Lean Manufacturing revolution of the past 2 decades. Just as they overturned the Taylor "time studies" approach to manufacturing, pioneers of Extreme Programming are literally reversing the traditional sequences used in software development, and finding much that can be eliminated.
Title:

One Team's Experience Adopting XP

Duration: 1 to 1.5 hours
Intended Audience: Software team leaders, developers, testers, technical managers
Assumptions: The audience has had first-hand experience with the software development cycle at least from detailed design through integration test.
Program Synopsis: This seminar will cover the practical details of how a software team moved to Extreme Programming for a project that contained many technical challenges;
  • use a new microprocessor before final silicon was ready
  • simultaneous data transmissions using different protocols
  • co-design of architecture with customer's engineers
  • implement complex math algorithm that was also under development
Even junior engineers were able to be highly productive because of the "safety net" effect that Extreme Programming creates. But it wasn't a walk in the park - this team made just about every mistake that can be made with XP and lived to tell the tale.
Title:

What Corporate Change Agents Need to Know About XP

Duration: 1 to 1.5 hours
Intended Audience: Managers responsible for software development or for products that have a significant software component. Turnaround managers.
Assumptions: The audience does not necessarily have a technical background; they are managers and entrepreneurs with an urgent interest in getting real business value from their software groups. And they want to know whether XP could work for them.
Program Synopsis: So your management is going to introduce Extreme Programming? Or your company has a team that has started using XP? A successful XP team will generate waves of changes that you need to anticipate and accommodate. There will be pressures on HR, on facility layouts, and a changing role for the managers who work with XP teams. Managers who are considering moving to XP do not need to know the internal XP practices as much as they need to know how the relationships surrounding the software team will change. Software's relation to Marketing, QA, and Tech Support will have to change. This seminar will discuss those relationships and how managers can head off potential problems.
Title:

Embedded XP: the Techniques that Win

Duration: 1 hour
Intended Audience: Software developers, Technical managers, firmware developers.
Assumptions: Audience has some background in software development, especially embedded software. Program Synopsis: Nearly all the XP (Extreme Programming) literature is written for web or desktop software development. Can you use XP for embedded software? How? XP preaches that you design as you go along but you can't re-spin the hardware with every release. You must balance the long-lead design with agile design and refactoring. This talk will cover what you need to know to tailor XP for embedded development, giving examples actually used by real teams.
Title:

How Does QA Fit Into Extreme Programming?

Duration: 1 to 1.5 hours
Intended Audience: QA engineers and their managers, software testers, software developers.
Assumptions: Audience is familiar with the problems of trying to test software that is delivered late, with poor documentation, etc. Understanding of automated tests is not necessary.
Program Synopsis: Extreme Programming gives priority to testing. But just how does the role of Test and QA people change with XP? This talk describes how they become collaborators in the design of the software, and the developers learn to clean up after themselves. No more throwing software "over the wall" to QA the night before it has to ship! This seminar is based on the experience of a real software team that learned to bring QA fully into the development loop, and how that changed both groups.