Experiences of First CSD Course in India, Bangalore 02 – 04 Feb’2011

It has been bit more than 2 months since we conducted the first CSD course in India. Writing about our experiences of this first course somehow kept on getting postponed by one or the other reason. Today I decided to give it a go believing “Better Late than never” 🙂

As I have mentioned in my last post on this subject, Inphina is conducting the training under the umbrella of GoodAgile in collaboration with old colleague and good friend Srinivas Chillara from Scrum Coach. We decided to conduct our first course in Bangalore because of heavy presence of Software professionals and generally greater demand than anywhere else in India for these kind of trainings. We were pleasantly surprised by the response as we soon sold out all the seats and had to put several candidates on the wait-list.

Course Overview Following are the broad agenda items we covered during the course:

• Test Driven Development
• Emergent Design and Agile Architecture
• Refactoring
• Collaboration
• Continuous Integration

As the course centers on how part of Scrum methodology like delivering high quality software, embracing change in design of the system, cross-functional teams, fast and short delivery cycles, potentially shippable product increments, high velocity on a regular basis, we designed the course in a very hands-on manner. Before the start of the course, we sent out a list of hardware and software pre-requisites to all the participants to let me be prepared for the course.

Running the actual course We followed what we call a Two-Pass approach for the course. In this, we provided a brief overview about each of the five areas to be covered during the training and followed it up with a discussion with participants. This allowed us more clarity on their expectations along with some specific areas which should be either stressed more or incorporated during the course. After the first-pass, we delved into detail about each of the areas. For each topic, we used a combination of presentations, demos with code samples followed by one/more hands-on exercises to be done by the participants. Let’s quickly get into some of the significant details about each of the topics: