Other Courses
These are the less technical courses in Agile Institute’s Essentials Series.
After reading Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, with its key message of “less, but better,” I decided to focus mostly on my technical Agile courses, and make them the very best available anywhere.
Each of the courses on this page has also benefited from that focus, and each has gone through its own evolution.
Essential Agile Principles & Practices
UPDATE 25Mar2025: LEGOs® make a comeback! This course is available as the 2-day introductory version of the Essential Agile Developer Skills course, which is also my Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer® (CSD) course. It is the less technical, less coding-centric prerequisite to Advanced Certified Scrum Developer® (also taught as a version of Essential Agile Developer Skills).
This “Agile Intro” course is great fun, and highly practical. It introduces teams to the Agile Manifesto, frameworks, roles, events, principles, and practices. To simulate Agile software development, and to give everyone a sense of each Agile team role, participants build a toy village out of LEGOs®. This exercise is the best I’ve found to simulate software development without actually slinging code. Participants can even experience Test-Driven Development and refactoring practices!
Incremental Design Essentials
This course walks participants through a number of software design principles (OO, SOLID, CUPID, Design Patterns, Beck’s Four Rules of Simple Design), uncovering the commonalities. Participants are introduced to the skills necessary to obtain great incremental, emergent software design. I’ve since blended some of the materials into other “Essential Series” courses. For example, Essential Agile Developer Skills (Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer® and Advanced Certified Scrum Developer®) contains a lesson on Emergent Design including Terhorst-North’s CUPID and Beck’s Four Rules.
Essential Agile Product Leadership
Many years ago, this course got a strong start, thanks to a client who wanted it delivered to the entire Board of Directors of a big petroleum/energy multi-national. It includes visioning, Agile Portfolio Planning, Cost of Delay, Theory of Constraints, the “Iron Triangle” (really more of a wobbly iron rhomboid), User Stories, Story Mapping, story splitting techniques; and wraps up with a taste of BDD, Example Mapping, and Gherkin scenarios. Some—but not all—of this material is also in Behavior Driven Development Essentials.