NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION SPECIAL

Continuous integration (CI) is a great foundation practice for increasing quality and decreasing cycle time. This package gets you started with CI. I work with one or more of your team members for a full day to train them on CI concepts, plan your CI setup, and actually start building it out. I follow that up with 2 hours of phone or email consulting (as you need it) to keep you moving in the right direction as you complete your CI implementation. $1,775.

Humanizing Work’s normal Agile Assessment service takes two weeks and produces a comprehensive, actionable report to help you move from where you are now to where you’d like to be—successfully delivering high-quality, valuable software in very short cycles. Assessment Light is the 80/20 version of this. You and your staff start by completing a questionnaire. Then, I spend a day on-site with you, observing and conducting interviews. At the end of the day, I share my findings with you and help you identify your biggest constraint and build a plan to deal with it. $1,995.

Acceptance Test Driven Development, or ATDD, is the practice of creating functional tests for a feature before implementing that feature. It’s a great way to improve communication between the Product Owner and team while improving quality (and ensuring that QA doesn’t get pushed off the back of the sprint). In this full-day workshop, I introduce the practice, your team gets their hands dirty doing ATDD on an example application (which can be customized to use your technologies), and then we work through how to apply ATDD to your specific project. This workshop is great with a single team and can scale up to about 20 people. $1,775.

One of the keys to getting the most out of agile software development is having a great product backlog. After all, a fast team without a solid backlog is just building lots of low-value software. In this workshop, I work with you to refine your product vision, identify the highest value features, and make sure those features are decomposed into user stories that will enable the team to build just the right software. Depending on the size of your product and how well you already understand the Product Owner role and product-related concepts and artifacts, this can be a full- or half-day workshop. I can help you decide which option is right for you. $1,850 (full-day), $1,195 (half-day).

Many teams struggle with how to do software architecture in an agile environment. You don’t want spaghetti, but you also don’t want to waste time up front designing a system that’s likely to change. In this one day workshop, I discuss the issues and practices of agile architecture with your senior technical staff and help you define an architectural approach for one of your projects. $1,775.

Sending your ScrumMaster to a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course is a proven way to get them started with Scrum. But it’s also important to educate the rest of the team on Scrum if you’re going to adopt it successfully. For less than the price of sending one person to a CSM course, this half-day workshop can get up to 20 people up to speed with Scrum and help them understand their role in the process. $1,195.

A new year can be a great time to look back on what has and hasn’t worked well and to forge a plan to move forward. The combination of focusing on a long time period and using an outside facilitator can bring out issues that don’t show up in the normal sprint retrospectives. A special retrospective can also be a great time to bring in voices that aren’t normally part of your retrospectives (e.g. operations or help desk if those are separate groups). In this half-day meeting, I help your group gather data from the past year, make sense of that data, and set goals and action plans for improvement in 2009. $1,195.