Certified Scrum Master Course and Heart of Agile with Alistair Cockburn

Melbourne
When:      TBA
Instructor: Dr. Alistair Cockburn

Agile has become overly decorated. Let’s scrape away those decorations for a minute, and get back to the center of agile.”

This course is pure agile, for all job titles in any industry. It sets the standard for entry-level learning, and re-establishes the subtle aspects of agile development for intermediate practitioners.

In this course,

• Understand what is and isn’t agile development, what is in the heart of agile, what is decoration, and how that decoration came about;
• See how teamwork, communication & frequent delivery affect your project; 
• Understand Scrum and non-Scrum;
• Gather additional techniques;
• Understand the heart of agile.

Agile Manifesto Co-Author Dr. Cockburn will help you learn how it feels to be doing effective agile, whatever your industry or role.

Level: 

Beginner and Intermediate.

Who Should Attend: 

Job titles in any industry, people looking to understand the essential concepts and techniques of agile development, independent of any branded methodology. 

Course Goal for Attendees: 

• Why agile works, the central principles of agile development
• The “Heart of Agile”: Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve
• How to do incremental, value-based development
• Scrum and non-Scrum approaches
• How to apply the “Cooperative Game of Invention and Communication”
• How to improve team habits
• Planning and adapting, finding the Walking Skeleton and 1st Payment
• Feature thinning, story splitting, fine-grained incremental development

Full description

Attend this course from one of the founders of the agile movement to understand what is and what isn’t agile development; to develop a feeling for how teamwork, communication, customer interaction and continuous improvement affect your project; to understand Scrum and the role of the ScrumMaster; to gather a few techniques to take home and use immediately. 

This course de-emphasizes the ornate and complicated rules of the different varieties of Scrum and other named agile approaches, emphasizing instead the four basic elements of good agile development: Collaborating, Delivering, Reflecting, Improving.

The course is intended to introduce agile development to people in any role in any industry, independent of any branded agile methodology. In other words, pure agile, the heart of agile. The course developed and evolved over a ten-year period, incorporating insights from teaching both the Certified ScrumMaster and International Consortium for Agile curricula. As such, it is suitable for people working in Scrum-based organizations, as well as those using a free-form style of Agile.

The main purpose of the course is to give attendees a deep appreciation for the power of agile development, when done effectively. Each of the core steps, Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve, gets attention, so that the student understand how and why each works and contributes to improved team results. 

The course adds theory – why agile works – so that the student has an idea of how and where changes can be made in real-life situations while staying within the agile sweet spot. And finally, it adds specific planning techniques such as Blitz Planning, so that the student has specific techniques in hand to return to the project with.

This course is based on the award-winning book Agile Software Development, and on Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams. It is suited for any job role, from secretary, to designer or tester or project manager, to sponsoring or steering executive, in any industry.