In 2022, a primary challenge for many organizations is “doing more with less.” You might be facing one or more of the following challenges:

• A smaller budget

• Teams struggling to keep up with unprecedentedly heavy workloads

• A numer of underskilled team members

• Difficulties hiring skilled team members

These conditions foster software development teams that are neither effective or efficient. They can also result in demoralized or apathetic teams.

You want to make your customers happy with what you deliver. And you need to deliver early and often. But you know you’re only increasing cost and risk every time you ship low-quality software to hit a deadline.

In this hands-on class, your teams will learn how to build high-quality software with a heavy focus on reducing costs both short-term and long-term. They’ll learn by adding capabilities to actual open-source software, with the intent of delivering value to the software development community as a whole.

Streamlined Software Development isn’t organized around topics–because real software development life doesn’t work that way. We won’t overwhelm your software team with overused, overpromising buzzwords and frameworks. Instead, your team will experience incremental learning in the context of building real software.

Each day of Streamlined Software Development training looks like the following:

Throughout each day, we’ll incrementally reflect on new learnings and how they help propel the team forward in a more effective and efficient way.

Who should be there and when?

All team members are invited to participate throughout the entire day, and come & go as appropriate. Due to the highly-incremental, hands-on nature of this way of working, the bulk of the day is geared towardis people comfortable with talking about and doing programming and testing. Still, anyone is welcome to sit in on these hands-on parts of the day and contribute or observe. We’ve had managers, POs, BAs, and others happily getting their hands dirty in similar sessions.

The following legend to the daily schedule provides some hints as to whom might show up during the various pieces of a training day:

We can accommodate your scheduling needs

Scheduling options include:

• Classic (across consecutive days, e.g. Mon through Wednesday)

• Spread (non-consecutive days, e.g. every Friday for 3 weeks)

• some combination of Classic + Spread

The duration of the training is at your discretion. We recommend 3-5 training days, but you might find value in extending to two-to-four training weeks.

Where are we learning?

Streamlined Software Development training is designed to be remote, though we can deliver it on-site also. Its use of mob programming with the git handover technique maximizes the comfort level and positive experience for everyone participating.

What are we learning?

Don’t sweat the lack of a topical organization: Your teams will learn piles of useful concepts and techniques daily, as well as begin to ingrain positive habits due to the use of short-cycle iterations during training. Students will learn elements of modern practices that include behavior-driven development (BDD), test-driven development (TDD), software design principles, simple design, refactoring, continuous integration/delivery, and mob programming (also known as ensemble programming). We’ll also discuss numerous other topics around programming: katas and professional practice, code smells, test smells, SOLID, design patterns, test doubles, mocks, legacy code, metrics, and more.

Attendees will learn the difference between concise, clear code, and code that increases the cost of maintenance, new development, support, etc. They’ll learn how a continual attention to quality creates an environment that is efficient, effective, and enjoyable.

Is this agile?

Yes. Streamlined Software Development is designed to be perhaps the most fully-realized embodiment of the four core agile values and dozen principles behind the Agile Manifesto.

Does it work in the context of Scrum™ or SAFe®?

Yes, and you might find that Streamlined Software Development will help you discard some unnecessary ceremony from your development week.

What does Streamlined Software Development value?

Low ceremony, low cost, low risk, high quality, and high success. We also value the four principles of “modern agile,” particularly psychological safety.

How will I know it’s helped my teams?

Numerous studies and anecdotal results suggest both quality and efficiency improvements with proper application of the practices we promote, including things like TDD, BDD, collaborative programming, and lower WIP. We’ve also heard that “quality pays for itself.” Studies also exist that show happy employees are more productive.

Still, your team is unique. Stories and research don’t guarantee success.

Your team will let you know during training and afterward how things feel. We’ll be capturing particularly illuminating quotes, and so should you. The kind of things we hear often include: “We had a lot of fun today;” “I love the collaborative nature (of how we’re working),” and “We’re going faster than we were before.”

Over time, you’ll be able to see improvements in the DORA metrics, four key indicators that have been proven to measure success. Streamlined Software Development is designed to directly impact each of these metrics.

Reserve a spot for your team now!