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Posted by Shane Hastie on May 20, 2009
Agile is an approach that focuses on high-bandwidth communication and creating self-organising teams. Will virtual training be beneficial to the uptake of Agile methods, or is the concept of virtual training anathema to an Agile organisation? What follows is a brief look at a sample of the face to face training consolidators and providers out there – far from comprehensive but a starting point for further investigation.
Scrum is probably the best known of the Agile techniques, and has a certification associated with its training. There are two levels of Scrum certification training, under the auspices of the Scrum Alliance. The Alliance restricts and accredits trainers who are allowed to offer certified Scrum training. A Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) is allowed to deliver training courses which they design; the course must address the basic Scrum structure and content. CSTs must pay an annual subscription fee of US$7500 to maintain their certified trainer status.
A CST is authorised to deliver the following Scrum courses:
Since 1 April 2009 the student must pass an exam to achieve ScrumMaster certification, and reaccredit every two years. Ongoing membership of the Scrum Alliance costs US$50 per year.
The Scrum Alliance maintains a list of CSTs and all the certified courses on offer.
The Scrum Alliance lists courses on offer all around the world.
A consolidator of Agile training in North America is the Agile University.
The mission statement of the Agile University is:
“To instill Agile principles, share knowledge of Agile practices and advance the adoption of Agile approaches. Through this collaborative effort, we manifest the power of people working together to perfect the art of software development”
The Agile University offers a variety of services to training providers.
Agile University lists courses from a broad range of trainers, covering the whole gambit of Agile approaches. Agile luminaries such as Alistair Cockburn list their courses on the Agile University site.
The courses listed on the Agile University website are listed by the level of experience/prior knowledge – beginner, intermediate and advanced. They cover topics as diverse as Agile Engineering, Agile Project Management, Certified ScrumMaster and a variety of soft skills.
The Agile University courses are offered in North America.
In May, InfoQ anounced their expansion into the highly competative training marketplace, with the launch of InfoQ Virtual Training. The InfoQ offering is headlined as "High quality virtual training that focuses on topics that are in demand today. Affordable and accessible, you can attend these virtual events from the comfort of your home or office" How effectively can a new provider compete in this marketplace, and will virtual trainings from InfoQ (and other online training providers) be valuable to the Agile community?
An Agile approach with a lot of traction in the United Kingdom is the Dynamic Systems Development Methodology (DSDM) - the DSDM consortium oversees training and certification under the DSDM umbrella.
Similar to the Scrum Alliance, the DSDM consortium accredits training providers and a certification program. The consortium website maintains a list of training providers and their training offerings.
The antipodes are embracing Agile with the recent launch of the Agile Academy.
The Academy website states
Welcome to the Agile Academy, the next wave in Agile learning and collaboration. Designed for IT professionals, the Agile Academy is a knowledge hub that promotes Agile related learning, knowledge sharing and capability development across the IT industry. We offer an integrated curriculum of leading edge courses across the entire solution development life cycle, covering all roles at varying levels.
The Academy was founded in response to a recognised gap in the marketplace in the region when Suncorp, a large Australasian financial institution, made the decision to go Agile across the whole organisation. (The Suncorp Agile journey will be the subject of a later article).
The Agile Academy is a collaborative organisation offering courses and materials from partner companies, including Thoughtworks and Software Education.
Similar to the Agile University, the Agile Academy courses are not aligned with a specific Agile methodology, but cover a variety of subject areas, from leadership and project management to developer techniques and software testing.
The training providers listed above are certainly not all that are out there. Tell us about others and your experiences with them.
Agile Development: A Manager's Roadmap for Success
Learning to be a Good Product Owner: Foundation Skills
The 5 Mandates of Software Development Teams - Presto Manifesto
VersionOne is recognized by Agile practitioners as the leader in Agile project management tools. Companies such as Adobe, BBC, CNN, Dow, HP, IBM, Sony and 3M have turned to VersionOne to help deliver greater value to their customers.
IT Samurai School at www.itsamuraischool.com is offering a few courses for agile development such as "Agile Software Development with Scrum and Extreme Programming" and related, more development-oriented courses such "Test-Driven Development" and "Refactoring and Refactoring to Patterns."
Visit our site for information on world-class, industrial-strength Agile/XP training and coaching, led by Joshua Kerievsky.
Also, be absolutely sure to take a tour of our Greatest Hits - web-based, workshop-style eLearning training in Test-Driven Development & Refactoring, Design Patterns, and more. There is no other XP eLearning in the world as advanced and complete as this.
Happy learning!
I find this article very strange to say the least. How did certain training providers get on the list and many others didn't? Did you give all of them a fair chance to be mentioned as well? What's the point of publishing the names of companies who can be as easily found via Google?
I find this article very strange to say the least.
It is kind of strange. Also one error I know of: The CSM test is not in effect until this Fall.
--mj
.
. 5-page illustrated summary of Scrum: tinyurl.com/dkyqjs
. An example checklist for serious ScrumMasters: tinyurl.com/cvdwor
.
We are recognized for our Agile training courses. In fact, since 2005 we have trained and certified over 770 ScrumMasters. But this is only the half of it.
Our team of trainers are also practitioners of the essential Agile engineering practices, such as Agile Modeling, Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and of course, Test-Driven Development (TDD).
Come and take a look...
Eric
Training Director - Pyxis Technologies.
Brian Marick takes us through a quick tour of the most important values and challenges to adopting Agile successfully (they aren't the typical challenges and values we hear in the community).
The line between development and architecture is tricky. Does it exist at all? Is an ivory tower actually needed? There's a balance in the middle, but how do you move from developer to architect?
The word 'authority' sometimes produces an allergic response in hard-line agilists. Freedom and authority – both are bad if misused and both are good if used in right spirit for a noble cause.
"Getting Started with Grails" brings you up to speed on this modern web framework. Companies as varied as LinkedIn, Wired, and Taco Bell are all using Grails. Are you ready to get started as well?
Those familiar with only ITIL V2 often scoff at the thought that ITIL could serve as a governance framework for SOA. With ITIL V3, the focus of the framework shifted towards service-orientation.
SpringSource CTO Adrian Colyer discusses AspectJ, SpringSource's dm Server and tc Server products, OSGi and Scrum.
Heroku's Adam Wiggins talks about Rails, Background Jobs, Add-Ons, Ruby, and how Heroku manages to work around Ruby's inefficiencies using Erlang and other languages.
For Grady Booch the foundation of a good architecture is patterns, SOA being just one of many patterns. In this Second Life presentation, Booch attempts to bring more clarity on what architecture is.
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