Do you like the sound of the benefits offered by open source software but don’t know where to start? Are you baffled by the jargon but would like to be able to navigate the open source landscape to find a solution that works for your organisation?

Join us for this full day session where we explore the current open source landscape and will attempt to de-mystify the buzzwords and acronyms surrounding them. The morning session will take a look at the leading open source alternatives that organisations can use to deliver the enterprise applications that their business demands whilst keeping development costs low and software quality high. The session will also provide some ‘live’ demonstrations of developing with the Java open source technology stack. The afternoon session will focus on business intelligence (BI) software and will take a look at an Ingres and Jaspersoft integrated stack that makes installation and integration easier and less expensive to manage. This session will demonstrate how to create, publish and distribute reports as well as the techniques available to perform analysis on business data.

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This one day course provides a good all round introduction to Agile software development approaches.  Our trainer will equip you with the skills and knowledge you need to take Agile back in to your team. We’ve aimed this course at developers, testers, business analysts, database administrators, project managers and executives. The course is delivered as an interactive workshop, enabling you to learn from our trainer’s wealth of experience, as well as having the opportunity to address issues relevant to your own experience. This will help increase the likelihood of a successful adoption of Agile for your software development project.

We can also offer follow-on training. Because we believe adopting Agile is very personal each team and organistaion, we offer this  on an company basis. Our trainer works with your team to enable them to take on specific Agile roles. Typically this would be a two day on site coaching-style course, which would cover:

- one to one sessions with key team members including managers

- coaching on test driven development, continuous integration and other Agile techniques

- Development of an Agile process specific to your organisation

- Development of Agile documentation (user stories, product backlogs etc)

The funding also applies to this offer - please contact us direct to discuss your requirements and we will be able to provide further details and costs.

Your trainer is Nick McKenna, Certified Scrum Master and Practitioner. Nick runs his own successful software development house using Agile principles and practices. Nick is also treasurer for the Agile Yorkshire group which meets monthly to promote Agile development in our region.

This two day course is designed to introduce delegates to a structured approach to planning, managing and controlling a project. Group and individual activities cover a range of project scenarios and practical tasks. The course provides a solid grounding in project management techniques and approaches, and is an excellent benchmark for project managers across a range of sectors, and sizes of organisation.

February 8th 2010 - February 9th 2010

PRINCE2® is a structured project management method that has become an effective standard for organising, managing and controlling all types of projects. Its reputation as a highly effective, process-based approach to project delivery is widespread across public and private sectors in the UK including the Yorkshire region, and further a field. In recent years an increasing number of smaller organisations have embraced PRINCE2’s® ’structured common sense’ methodology in order to effectively manage their growing portfolios of client projects. Our trainer Marian Watson is a highly experienced PRINCE2® trainer and we believe she is one of the best. Our current pass rate for Practitioner is just over 97%.

January 11th 2010 - January 15th 2010 (City Centre training site in Sheffield please contact us for further details)

January 25th 2010 - January 29th 2010

February 22nd 2010 - February 26th 2010

March 22nd 2010 - March 26h 2010

The Technical Aspects of Agile training course looks at the benefits of particular project management methods and is aimed at developers and team leaders who are already familiar with Agile approaches. This two day course examines three important technical aspects of Agile open source software development: pair programming; test driven development; and re-factoring.

Pair programming on first impressions, especially in senior management, can seem completely counter-intuitive. Surely, by getting two people to do the job of one person you’re just halving your productivity? A substantial body of research shows quite the opposite - that pair programming does’t reduce productivity, but maintains productivity whilst substantially reducing the number of serious defects that are found in the code.

Test driven development benefits the software development process by automatically testing the practice of software functionality. The course covers writing these tests and coding against them using the framework JUnit.

The re-factoring techniques understand and accept that software development code, over time, can become messy and disorganised. The advantages of test driven development allow for principled clean up of code.

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