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Training Courses |
O X F O R D S O F T W A R E E N G I N
E E R I N G |
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OSEL Workshops and Training Courses:
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We have developed a set of training courses and workshops,
both as public offerings and tailored to client needs to equip practitioners
or inform management. These courses
are designed around software development and process improvement best practice,
reflect our experience and beliefs, and incorporate emerging practices we
believe hold promise. Note: The material in these courses is our own and can be
selected and adapted to your particular needs. The exceptions are the SEI’s
CMMI courses we supply (not listed here). These courses, delivered by the
European Software Institute and owned by the Software Engineering
Institute must be delivered unmodified if participants are to register
their participation with the SEI. Contact us to find out more about these
courses. Software
Development and Management Courses… |
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Requirement
Engineering. Good requirements are the foundation of successful
projects, poor requirements the most common cause of project problems. They
are the basis of the agreement between the software team and the customer.
Good requirements reduce project timescales, rework, and focus testing to
where it is needed. They help projects deliver what the customer and user
need. This course is designed to equip analysts and developers with simple
and effective tools to discover, refine, analyse, and manage requirements,
and to share this understanding of what is needed and what will be delivered
across the team and with users and customers. The methods and techniques
presented in this course are independent of tools (although they can be used)
and are applicable in most software development environments. They can be
selected and adapted to work in most situations. Note: This course encompasses the practices specified
in the CMMI’s Requirement Development and Requirements Management process
areas. Ref.: SPT-01 ·
Software
Estimation: Principles and Practice. Credible estimates enable and encourage adequate resourcing
and build confidence that projects will deliver on schedule. This course
shows how to develop and maintain good project estimates. It teaches both the
technical and human aspects of software project estimation. Participants
learn the three best estimation techniques, how distinguish estimates from
targets, and to recognize and deal with possible distortion of estimates by
project or business pressures. Ref.: SPT-04 ·
Reviews,
Walkthroughs and Inspections: Principles and Practice. Reviews, Walkthroughs and Inspections
are the most widely applicable and most effective software quality controls.
Performed well they can transform a software project or software
organization, improving software quality out of all recognition and
triggering major reductions in rework and project costs. We offer two
courses. The first explains the remarkable capabilities of reviews and
inspections, and equips managers and technical staff to use and perform them.
The second course (for which the first is a prerequisite) is designed for
candidate review moderators, training them to plan, administer and lead
reviews, walkthroughs and inspections. Ref.: SPT-02 ·
Software
Risk Management. Risk
analysis is routinely performed, but rarely done well. This course looks at
conventional risk management and develops it to make the de facto
standard approach work better. It revises familiar techniques, and adds new
one to enable the real risks to emerge. Modelling and a statistical approach
are introduced to enable important risks to be evaluated more accurately than
the usual ‘high, medium, low’ or 1 to 5 evaluation. At the end of this course
participants are equipped to perform robust, accountable and credible risk
management for their projects. They will also learn the wider ranging
techniques for controlling project risk by design - how to design (or
redesign) their project processes to make them intrinsically low risk.
Ref.: SPT-06 ·
Software
Quality Assurance: Principles and Practice. The function and value of QA is demonstrated, and its
interaction with other parts of the business explained. Roles and
responsibilities are described in a way that allows them to be interpreted
usefully for participant’s organization and culture. Ways for setting up, or
resurrecting, an effective QA function are described. It includes OSEL’s
Focussed Quality Assurance (FQA) – a method for the rapid (agile, even)
installation of a QA capability. Ref.: SPT-08 ·
Lean
Software Development. This is
based on Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s excellent work interpreting lean manufacturing
for software development. |
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Our
Software Process Improvement Courses… |
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CMM: An Unofficial Course. CMM was the
original software maturity model and the predecessor of the CMMI. It is now officially
superseded by CMMI but remains one of the most effective frameworks for
software development and process improvement. The focus of CMM is software
development and software management. This focus on software makes it
technically more appropriate to software organizations and it contains many
valuable features and characteristics of value for both software development
and software process improvement that may have been lost or compromised in
the transition to CMMI. This
course covers the CMM model in depth, CBA IPIs (one of the best software
process diagnostic methods) and guidance on using CMM and CBA IPIs for real,
effective, business directed process improvement. This course will be of
interest to organization wanting a to use model to understand and improve
their software capability without the cost, overheads and distraction of
official accreditation. This course can be tailored to focus on particular
process groups, maturity levels, or individual process areas. Ref.: SPT-14 ·
CMMI: An
Unofficial Course. This
takes an unconstrained and free ranging look at the CMMI model, its
background, strengths and weaknesses, and critically, how to use it to
improve software development and management performance, not just achieve
model conformance. (The value of a performance focussed use of CMMI is that,
apart from improved performance being the primary, rather than nominal,
objective, it also reduces the time and cost of achieving CMMI compliance.)
Particular attention is paid to the ‘generic practices’ as the drivers for
better process performance. Ref.: SPT-14a ·
Software
Measurement. This
course distils more than thirty years experience of software measurement to
show how to get value from this critical, but notoriously difficult subject.
Using the GQM (Goal Question Metric) model as a framework the course leads
participants through the fundamentals of software measurement. The principles
of software measurement are revealed and supporting tools and techniques are
demonstrated. Numerous examples of good and bad practice are used so that at
the end of this course participants are equipped to specify, design an
implement and validate useful and cost effective software measurement, or
simply refine or reduce the costs of their existing measurement systems. Ref.: SPT-12 ·
Process
Modelling. This equips
process engineers with the simple and robust techniques and methods of
technical and business process identification, analysis and definition. Also covers
Software Process Architectures and Software Process Infrastructures Ref.:
PIT - 02 ·
Rapid
Process Improvement: This
course takes a results oriented approach to SPI. With much in common with evolutionary
development and agile development approaches RPI uses small feedback loops to
deliver real world results that can be evaluated and built upon to establish
a stable, ongoing cycle of improvement. This course equips process engineers
with a comprehensive toolset for cost effective, inclusive and low risk
process improvement. Ref.: SPT-13. See our RPI page.
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TCM: A
method for managing change and innovation. This is our own method for
identifying, structuring, planning, and managing improvement work at a
tactical level. Based on PDSA, but equipped with practical tools and
techniques, similar, but more flexible than DMAIC, TCM provides a robust
framework for identifying and analysing problems, evaluating and selecting
solutions and planning, performing and review their implementation, all
within very short timescales. Ref.: PIT- 01 ·
Six
Sigma: An Introduction. This begins with an examination of six sigma concepts, both
statistical and process improvement and then focuses on the new process
improvement six sigma methodology’s tools and techniques, and how they can be
adapted to software development. The course contains detailed coverage of
DMAIC and DFSS/DMADV, describing when to use, and not to use them. |
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These courses are available as is or can be tailored to
your audience, include your particular requirements, or integrate your
organization’s own processes, methods and tools, where appropriate. Contact us for
course data sheets or to find out more. CCS January/April 2009
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© Copyright OSEL 2009 |
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