Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's, client's, relative's, descendant's, or tax attorney's.
Well as it turns out brute strength can work, but it breaks a lot of things along the way. With your objective in hand you can stand triumphantly over the ruins of your development team. Now, will those now hardened veterans be willing to fight the same way for the next release?
I've been doing software development for close to ten years now and have seen several development, management, and operating styles. They all met with some measure of success and some measure of failure. Agile is the new guy in town and he's winning a lot of friends. Last week I spent three days at Jeffery Palermo's Agile Boot Camp offered by Headspring Systems. I've actually been part of three teams that made the transition from waterfall to SCRUM (another agile management method). So I wasn't sure if I was going to learn anything new. However after talking with Jeffery about the class and hearing how it was run, I thought it would be worth the expense. Seeing as how I currently do not have a day job, it beats playing WoW all day.
I'm glad I took the class. A recurring theme began to emerge that I've also noticed in discussions at the Agile Austin and ADNUG (Agile Developers Network Users Group) meetings. It's all about scale. My previous experiences with agile development have all been with Enterprise level software. I can already feel my nose rising as I type the word 'Enterprise.' Oh it just makes me feel so superior. What it really means is that Enterprise software probably tends to have a lot more process wrapped around it than something built for a smaller client. Many of the tools and techniques you will learn in Jerry's class will apply to your projects regardless of scale, but they really shine in an environment where you have a focused customer with a direct need and a small user base (<1000 users). Jeff's class is about efficiency. Do exactly what the customer wants with the least amount of effort in a way that is highly sustainable, portable, and automated. This is what I came to learn!
Being an ex-Microsoft man, I know Microsoft tools and process really well. And as far as corporations go, Microsoft does a good job of using enough process to reduce chaos, but not so much to prevent work from getting done. Your mileage may very if you are a Microsoftie. The company has tens of thousands of employees and many hundred groups, of which I have been a part of about three. This was my experience there.
That aside, Jeff's agile methodology offered a lot of new approaches that didn't fit in my previous world view which is what I want out of training. The class isn't workbook based either. You will develop a dynamic project, have design meetings, argue over how to build it, how to test it, and how to deploy it. You will learn a cool set of tools that he uses to accomplish these goals. They're not *the* set to use, but they are a good set that works. $2350 is a mortgage payment, a new laptop, or a pretty nice vacation. That being said I will certainly earn more than that out of applying the lessons learned in his class.
ROI > 1 .. Do