It seems like a lot of the newer people joining this group are signing up to "learn more about" Agile methodologies. Me included.

I see UWM offers a one day continuing education class on Agile Project management. Has anyone taken this class? Would it be worthwhile to take a class like that or are there other alternatives?

Since funding is limited for a lot of people, taking training classes can be difficult. Does anyone have book or on-line suggestions for learning about Agile?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

-John

John,

I am not familiar with the UWM course? Who's teaching it?

You can check out The Agile Journal at http://www.agilejourn..., it is an excellent online hub for agile content.

If your focus is Project Management (PM), there is an excellent book by Mike Cohn, "Agile Estimating and Planning", Prentice Hall, 2006. It does a great job of bridging the gap between conventional and agile PM techniques.

Hope that helps a bit.

Mohamed

The UWM course it taught by "Bob McIlree, PMP".

The basic description is "This course provides an overview of mainstream agile approaches such as XP, Scrum, DSDM and Unified Process. Here's a link to the complete description: http://www4.uwm.edu/s....

Its kind of an expensive two day seminar. So, I'd like to get some feedback as to whether it'd be worth the expense to get up to speed quickly. I want to be able to use Agile methods for some small scale free lance projects.

It looks like the Agile Journal has lots of good info. I'll have to check that out in more detail.

Thanks for you input.

-John

Sorry for the slow response.

I checked out the description. It looks good, but I think this is expensive for an intro especially if an employer is not paying for it. I think basics can be learned on your own and use the money to go to advanced more focused trainings. I am pretty sure you can find videos of lectures on most of these topics on you-tube already.

As far as applying agile to projects, in my humble opinion, the approach of "taking all the medicine at once" rarely works. That is, trying to adopt as much of agile as fast as possible disregarding the very real inertia that change requires. My advice would be to pick items that make sense for your situation to adopt first into your process. Then evaluate your progress and stage the adoption of other techniques/practices.

Mohamed.

> It seems like a lot of the newer people
> joining this group are signing up to
> "learn more about" Agile methodologies.

+1

> Would it be worthwhile to take a class like that

No, and HELL no.

Nine-hundred bucks for two days?

They're clearly subidizing the football team with UW-Extension fees.

> Does anyone have book

Not yet.

Anybody interested in plowing through some of the reviews at Amazon to get a feel for the "fresher" and "better" materials (whatever those terms mean in this context), and reply to this thread with some links and thoughts?

Textbooks would be great, especially older-versions that're relatively new, but not "stale", and HEAVILY discounted at the online resellers.

Volunteers?

> or on-line suggestions for learning about Agile?

Or names with contact information of local persons who "evangelize" and might do some 'chalk-talk' the boostrap presentations?

Mohamed, thanks for the sensible advice. I do have enough experience with project management that I can learn most of the basics on my own and then get more advanced training later. Since I'm the one paying, any training needs to be very value packed. I've read a few on-line articles about Agile and it seems very much in tune with the way I think so learning more of the basics in-depth from a book should work for me.

I'm glad I asked the question about the class. I'm kind of wondering: if someone is teaching a class about a particular subject wouldn't that person be involved with the local group advocating for that subject? In this case, why isn't the UWM instructor part of Milwaukee Agile?

As Jay suggested, it'd be nice to have a reading list about Agile. I'll do some research over the next couple of weeks and post a list of books or websites for comments or critiques by others. Mohamed gave a good resource (www.agililejournal.com). That site has a book list but nothing as basic as what I'm looking for.

I have a couple of big deadlines this week but I'll get a list going for next week.

Here's some very basic intros to Agile PM I found helpful.

Text based intro from the codeproject folks (almost always helpful):
http://www.codeprojec...

Fast paced youtube video covering all the bases (I liked his style, graphics):
SCRUM in Under 10 Minutes (HD) by @hamids
http://www.youtube.co...

A bit more in depth are a couple of text books I perused at Amazon that I think I'll get:
1. Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber
2. Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn

The two books that John mentions above are great reads and great agile references.

Another book recently released by Mike Cohn that you may want to pick up is "Succeeding with Agile : Software Development Using Scrum".

Agile can mean different things to different people, so it can be hard to recommend the "right" books. For example, if you are interested in Scrum, Ken Schwaber's book referenced by John and Mike Cohn's book referenced by me are great starting points. But they won't help if you want to know more about extreme programming (XP).

A good "general" agile book I can always recommend is "Lean Software Development, An Agile Toolkit" by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.

Hope that helps...
Ed Chaltry