XNSIO
  About   Slides   Home  

 
Managed Chaos
Naresh Jain's Random Thoughts on Software Development and Adventure Sports
     
`
 
RSS Feed
Recent Thoughts
Tags
Recent Comments

Readiness Assessments for Training Classes

I get lots of queries for Agile Training in India. Good number of people approach me saying, “We already know TDD, we want advanced TDD training”. And it turns out that there are gaps in their Object Oriented thinking itself.

While I would really want to help these folks, if the expectations are not set right on both sides, it becomes very difficult to be effective.

To address this issue, since last few months, I’ve been sending people a readiness assessment for all my training courses. For example for the TDD and Refactoring workshop, I send them a programming assignment.

The problem used for the programming assignment is a decent sized problem statement with some user scenarios. Ideally it takes me at least a week to implement this problem. I ask the organization to pick 3-4 people from their target participants and ask them to solve this problem. Since they are clear that its a big problem, I ask them to prioritize the most important features and build those. I request them not to spend more than 4 hours on solving this problem. Once they solve the problem, they email me the code along with all the tests. I review their code and give them a detailed feedback.

Based on the feedback, I propose a training program. Then we mutally agree upon the agenda and objective for the training. This is proving out to be a very effective way to come up with a customized/tailored training ciriculum for each team.


    Licensed under
Creative Commons License