Gregory Brown on the Ruby Mendicant University
Gregory Brown explains the Ruby Mendicant University, a free online school for software developers that combines mentoring and training.
Gregory Brown explains the Ruby Mendicant University, a free online school for software developers that combines mentoring and training.
Although many products and solutions increasingly leverage software as an essential fundament, software engineers are becoming a rare species in Western countries. The problem with scarce availability of well-educated software engineers is that many companies require more engineers then they can get and if that gap widens, this could damage the leading edge of some companies.
The Scrum Alliance announced plans to strengthen the Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) designation into "a certification program that meets worldwide standards for structure and testing required for accreditation." The CSP designation, goes beyond the CSM as it requires experience applying agile in the workplace. Details for a beta program will be in the next Scrum Alliance Newsletter.
In recent blog posting Dan North, well known expert for software engineering and employee of DRW Trading, explains his rejection to the Manifesto for Software Craftmanship. This posting raised some immediate responses in the community and among the readers of the blog. According to Dan 20000 people visited his blog and 150 people left comments.
Need to deliver some Scrum training? Exercises can be more effective than a dry presentation. These exercises teach Scrum principles and techniques.

Learning a new programming language can be a daunting task and at times difficult to know where to start. Now try to learn a new web framework at the same time and you have a recipe for confusion. We had the opportunity to talk with Michael Hartl about his approach to teaching people Ruby on Rails, his book the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial, and the excellent video series with the same title.

Educator Dr. Dave West discusses “Systems Development”, a new discipline emphasizing humanity, craft, design, creativity, innovation, and emergence - in stark contrast with current university disciplines. West proposes a better educational experience, replacing the sterility of today’s classrooms and labs with the workshop, or “bottega.”

How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning integral to agile methodologies, but the learning needs of the newcomer are different from established team members: in a standup meeting, "I did (unintelligible) yesterday" offers them more questions than answers. Pat Kua suggests some practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.

Agile conferences are receiving an influx of novice teams and managers, and some suggest that new conferences should be organized for these beginners. To the contrary, this report from XPday Montreal suggests that mixing up expertise levels creates a valuable experience for all.
At QconLondon 2007 Jim Coplien spoke with "Pragmatic" Dave Thomas for InfoQ. This energetic 30-minute interview runs the gamut of Dave's wide-ranging interests: 'agile' publishing; how to turn what you love doing into a book; programming (and methodology) monocultures; staying limber with code "katas"; and advice for academics: help your students live with the passion of a 5-year old!

Venkat Subramaniam, international trainer and co-author with Dave Thomas of "Practices of an Agile Developer", talks about his passion for improving project success by incrementally implementing an Agile approach, specifically addressing large projects and projects in trouble.

Scrum, arguably the fastest-growing Agile methodology, is well described in the original Scrum books, which tend to be read once and put aside. Scrum is a framework with simple rules. This Scrum Checklist will help you to remember these simple rules in the heat of daily work and stress. It enable you to create an enjoyable and productive work environment with your Scrum-Team.