Course Catalog

Do you already know which problems you need to solve? If so, then browse the catalog below to select a course that fits your needs.

• Manufacturing Slack is the only way to realise value from developing new skills. It also helps urgent work move more quickly through your organisation, reaching your customer sooner. In this course we explore two important questions: why doesn’t your organisation invest enough in improvement and why does it continually expedite work based on which customer yells the loudest? More importantly, you can find slack in your system to help you get off the treadmill of overworking and underdelivering, and we can help you learn where to look.
• Product Sashimi is the art of the thinly-sliced product. This course teaches you simple techniques to excel at what Fred Brooks calls “the hardest single part of building a software system”. You learn how to find within your nebulous product idea the thin slices that have the most potential to generate profit sooner. Business and technical people alike learn to collaborate effectively, understand the product they need to build, and show accurate, meaningful progress towards completion.
• The World’s Best Intro to TDD somehow lives up to its name. It will help you learn the fundamentals of test-driven development as a design technique, including some specially-chosen rules that will help you avoid some common pitfalls that many experience when they teach themselves. If you work in an organisation dominated by traditional ideas about software design, then you will especially want to learn tips for justifying test-driven development to your fellow programmers, your project manager, and others even higher up on the organisation chart.
• Agile Design: Beyond the Basics fits best for programmers who have practised evolutionary design techniques for several months on a professional project and have run into their first set of obstacles. Certainly not an introduction to test-driven development, in this course you will learn how to overcome your first difficulties designing with test doubles (sometimes known as mock objects), how to model high-level design principles in terms of the elements of simple design, and more advanced techniques in rescuing legacy code.
• Making Your Agile Transition Work will help you avoid the fate of many agile transitions: going nowhere fast. Your agile transition can work, but you need to pay attention to what your competitors have ignored: you must get to the heart of your organisation’s problems before you can begin to apply tools from the agile toolbox.
• Learning Modular Design Techniques will help you learn how to become an expert designer, drive down the cost of changing code, increase the accuracy of cost estimates for detailed work, and be better able to respond to changing customer requests.