Mastering Unit Testing Course in Antwerp, Belgium September 24 and 25

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

We are partnering with local companies to provide our training curriculum in other countries. We started the Mastering Unit Testing course after we found many teams have started writing unit tests, but very few have experienced the benefits of hard-core test-driven development.

“You have some experience writing unit tests, but wonder how you could get more out of unit testing. Register for the Mastering Unit Testing training to experience how test driven development can make development faster and more enjoyable. You’ll learn how working test-first lets you create better designed code, and understand why unit testing techniques that are ‘simple’ in theory can be difficult to practice. Past participants have experienced less defects in production code, as well as higher velocity, which leads to happier clients and more fun in your job!”

See the Mastering Unit Testing page on the iLean site for registration and details. The first course is scheduled for September 24 and 25. After that we’ve also got our Mastering legacy code, November 16 and 17, also in Antwerp.

Televox

Televox by d.billy

photo found through Photo Suggest

new new Newsletter

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

A newsletter is much like software – if you create a larger batch of items, the work grows more than linearly (editing, translating, scrolling, selecting). It’s still worth it though – creating the newsletter on a regular basis helps to reflect on what we’ve done, but also creates focus: what are we going to do or research to make the next one interesting…. The positive response we’ve gotten so far also helps. Marc was kind enough to create a wordle to reveal more of the content:

QWAN newsletter topics, according to wordle

QWAN newsletter topics, according to wordle

Maybe because of the delay (we skipped May eventually) we not only have more items, they are also longer. We try to keep the newsletter short, but the things we discussed at conferences and while making the product development training gave us some inspiration to explain some topics in more detail. If the topics pique your interest, you can read it online or subscribe.

on/off the road :)

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

With the holiday season almost ending it is time to make plans for the rest of the year. Summer was enjoyable; After Marc and I went to the ESSAP summer school in Varese, we drove to Luzern, Switzerland for the first, and very succesful, in-house run of the Unit Testing Masterclass. Marc, Rob and I learnt a lot about what works (and what doesn’t) in our courses in the first half of this year, and it was very satisfying to see it come together… when we experiment it does’nt always, of course – the price of a little courage. I took two full weeks of holiday – highly recommended to you (yes you!), my fellow workaholics. Then on to agile2008 in Toronto, which I took as a sort of extended holiday, swimming everyday, chatting with people, the occasional session, and my last meetings as a member of the agile alliance board – I want to focus more on my business and travel less between timezones if it’s not business. And then a small roadtrip afterwards.

Now I’m ‘not travelling’ – visiting my girfriend in Bath, while working remotely, and meeting some people in London at the eXtreme Tuesday Club tonight.

I’m busy brainstorming some new training courses, and turning the spike of a customer relationship management system for eXperience Agile (soon to be relaunched under a different name, watch this space :) ) into something that is tested and ready for production. With Emmanuel Gaillot we’re translating eXperience Refactoring into “des excursions dans le rémaniement continu”, which we’ll do in-house in September, and hope to do an open enrollment one in Paris in October. In the Netherlands we’re planning to do some more open enrollment courses:

And 29 October I’ll be presenting “right sizing your unit tests” (a taster session for our unit testing masterclass) with Marc at the Scandinavian Agile Conference. I’ll probably also be running a session (wich one to be decided yet) at Xp Days Benelux November 20 & 21 in my hometown of Eindhoven and then later on enjoying the open space at XpDay London, 11th & 12th December.

And of course I’m planning to make more plans and blogging to make more blogs ;)

It’s over

Friday, April 4th, 2008

post it saying its’ over

This was the only ‘red’ card in the retrospective we held today at the end of another eXperience Agile :)

retrospective cards from friday

Further there was one looking ahead (‘Drink & book’ -meaning looking forward to drinks in the bar and receiving the book at the end of the course).

Personally I also loved ‘no more questions’ (I guess there will be more after a night of sleep). One thing we experimented with was shortening the iterations in Day 3′s exercises, so we would have time for a bit of questions and answers ‘open space’ style (or XP style – questions on post-its prioritized by the participants).

We had quite a number of ‘puzzles’ on Wednesday and Thursday, mainly open questions… And some red cards. Most related to traffic jams. Other cards we resolved quickly (not enough overview on the agend for the course – easily done with an extra flipchart, another one was that we had two pairs working off the same repository by accident, we still have some manual steps in installing workspaces that we do not yet know how to automate well due to the environment we are using. ).

wednesday retrospective cards

thursday retrospective cards

Seeing the green cards, and the happy, exhausted faces, there probably was quite a bit of accelerated learning going on – and that is not a coincidence.

I ‘m especially pleased to see green cards where we used to have red and yellow – dilligent work, and keep on trying to improve a few things each and every course. I don’t know what we’re going to change in the next one (we have some ideas around acceptance testing and have been experimenting), but I’m sure we are going to change some things. We, the ‘instructors’ are also part of the learning community, and I strongly believe our own learnings accelerates that of the other participants.

Therefore we hold retrospectives after every course day. Sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes the next day. Where it makes sense we ‘stop the production line’ and fix problems immediately, e.g. answer questions and gather questions for further discussion in a separate block or over lunch. In other courses this also helped us streamline exercises, the build environment etc.

As you might see in the green and yellow cards, much fun (green cards) and puzzles (yellow cards) come from the open source tools and games generously donated to the world. This includes the xp game, ruby, rspec, test/unit (included in ruby), firewatir, and of course techniques like XP, Refactoring and TDD that you can (amongst many sources) still read about on the C2 wiki and the XP mailinglist. And of course retrospectives.

I hope these happy colourful photos inspire you to experiment with retrospectives. A word of warning… besides focusing on what you can do better, don’t forget to celebrate the green cards (I have that tendency – still a bit of a perfectionist) and relax before the next round of improvments. Have a nice weekend :)

Course brochure :)

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Marc, Rob and I proudly present the first release of our courses and workshops brochure. We’ve bundled the courses and workshops we’ve developed over the last couple of years with new ones and practical information. We hope this gives you a clear overview of what we have to offer:

brochure

As with our courses, the brochure is also developed in eat-your-own-dogfood style. Work iteratetively, use small batches and feedback, for example. I’m still a bit weak on formal acceptance tests, but the main goal seems to be happening – sell more courses in more places – and have fun teaching them.

How did we do it? Marc found a printer that prints nice full-colour brochures in small batches, so we can apply feedback to each new batch. We started out by sending out the beta PDF to a handful of people, and feedback was so encouraging, that we made the first batch without all suggestions incorporated… We now have a small inventory of things to do, which we’ll process before the next print run.

I’ll bring some to the cultural patterns presentation in Houten tonight. I wasn’t sure at first whether making a brochure was worth the effort, having done some before with mixed results. So far it’s worked better than expected – the extensive descriptions and the wicked course-flow diagram Marc made come across well, and seem to make the courses much more tangible, which leads to better conversations. So all in all, making and distributing it is an enjoyable experience. Let us know what you think – your feedback is most welcome.