Emmanuel Gaillot just blogged about our upcoming French Refactoring Training.

January 28 and 29 at the office of Octo Technology in Paris. This training will be in French. We ran it together in-house (also in Paris) and it worked quite well . The training was good fun, we did even more things dojo-style (including demos) than I normally would, and we made time for hands-on systems thinking. I think with the experiments we’ve done this year, that we’ve finally found a good way to do systems thinking with programmers. It seems to be a bit more intuitive for managers and coaches,  but presented in the right way, it turns out developers find it eXtremely valuable. Surprisingly (not ) the topic the developers chose for their diagram was not entirely technical: how too much labour turnover was hindering their productivity and maintenance.

In other other news: the QWAN newsletter is out. It has some instruction on how to do your own Temperature Reading, conference reports and the public courses agenda. Enjoy!

Now it is time to relax after a  busy and period. Maybe I’ll finally get around to posting photos from all the conferences we’ve been to since october…

After running it in-house (Marc and I are travelling to Switzerland in two weeks to do just that ), we are now happilly responding to demand for an open-enrollment Unit Testing Masterclass. In this class we practice more Test- and Behaviour-driven development in small steps, you will experience various mocking techniques as well as how (not) to make tests that you and your colleagues can understand.

First courses planned are 8,99 and 22,23 September in Tilburg, Netherlands. See the course page for a full description and the booking form to reserve your space. We are looking forward to meeting you there!

One of the few courses that goes in-depth in both Agile planning practices as well as technical practices. See the course page for a full description.

First off, the commercial service announcements. Marc Evers has joined the ranks of eXperience Agile facilitators. He is supporting Rob and me in getting a new Refactoring course off the ground. We plan to do trial runs in february (currently talking to a couple of places to do that, drop us a line if you are interested) and then the first public one, eXperience Refactoring, March 4 and 5, near Eindhoven.

Participants in other courses have long been asking us for a Refactoring course, a topic we mostly cover by showing and doing Test Driven Development, where Refactoring is a ‘natural’ step, so you don’t need to talk about it much. This one is going to cover refactoring in more challenging situations (e.g. when there is a bulk of legacy code – code without tests, or the team has been cutting corners for a while). This will prepare participants to stay vigilant in good times, and calm, resolved and focused in bad times…

We’re also planning to run another eXperience Agile near Eindhoven, 25 through 27 February and publish an extended course schedule for the rest of the year. Yesterday’s weather says eXperience Agile runs about every two months, so we plan to run instances near the end of April and June.

More new courses are in development for the second quarter. We’re listening to our customers, and would also love to hear from others what kind of courses they want.

Marc and I have been invited to present Beyond Agile at QCon London in March, which is a further development of the People vs. Process session we ran at XP Days Benelux and London. I’ve heard from several people that it had quite an impact, amongst others, people at other companies giving our presentation in-house).

People versus Process participants exercise at xp days london

The new title was a suggestion from the QCon organizers. It fits well with feedback we got so far, to make it (even) clearer what the relation with agile software development is. We are working on a paper to explain it in more detail, and we’re thinking of running an open enrollment course combining people versus process with systems thinking in June.

I’m planning to attend Agile Open France, which now has a location: Hotel Arnold in Itterswiller, France (it is near Strasbourg, in the Elzas). Contrary to what I stated before, the dates are 5, 6 and 7 March.

To keep you up to date with upcoming courses and places I’ll be, I added two feeds to the sidebar: the Public courses feed and the Events I’ll be at feed . In case you notice I’m in your area, don’t hesitate contact me for a conversation over dinner and/or drinks