My Agile sessions

About twice a month, I conduct training sessions on Agile for the new employees joining my company. The main purpose of the session is to motivate the audience and instil in them an interest for the topic. I basically cover the following:

• Predictive Vs Adaptive
• Waterfall Model
• Agile & its Origin
• Agile Values & its Essence
• Agile Practices
• Distributed Agile & its Challenges
• Best Practices for Distributed Agile
• Agile in GlobalLogic - Velocity
• Velocity Platform
• Myths and Misuses

In India, Agile is yet to find its place and many IT companies still follow a more or less traditionalist approach to software development. This gets reflected in the attitude and the questions that I usually face at these sessions.

I'll try to document anything interesting that comes up in individual sessions.

17 Nov 06
Audience size: 18 people
Audience experience: 3 - 8 years
Audience domain: Mostly developers, a couple of QAs
Summary: Pre lunch. Jolly group with great quips here and there. Quite interactive.
Key discussions: "Is documentation not important?", "Documentation generated through CASE tools", "How is Agile different from iterative models?", "Agile is iterative but not all iterative models are Agile"

06 Dec 06
Audience size: 10 people
Audience experience: 2.5 - 8 years
Audience domain: Mostly developers, a couple of QAs
Summary: Post lunch. Dark room (bad idea!). Drowsy atmosphere but managed to get some interaction, especially towards the end. Got a "thank you" from audience!!
Key discussions: "Do we repeat entire SDLC for each iteration?", "How are iterations different from maintenance fixes?", "Cannot distinguish how Agile's different from what's normally done in the industry these days", "Is 'Agile' simply a marketing term?"

21 Dec 06
Audience size: 10 people
Audience experience: 6 - 7 years
Audience domain: Project Leads in development and QA domain
Summary: Post lunch but bright room. Started off without much interaction but I succeeded in turning that around midway. Focussed on the personal qualities needed for being Agile.
Key discussions: "Waterfall is not evil but needs to be applied only where applicable", "Just enough documentation", "Agile and attrition", "Agile practices like code review, coding standards, etc", "Necessary virtues like courage, team playing, honesty, etc", "Does Agile mean directly jumping to coding?"

Tags: technology:agile Last modified 07:01 Thu, 28 Dec 2006 by AmanKing. Accessed 1,089 times Children What Links Here Share Except where expressly noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.