Urban Turtle is pleased to announce it is partnering with a select group of training organizations offering the Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) program. These organizations are Accentient, Pluralsight, Pyxis and SSW. Partnership involves a credit promotion for Urban Turtle and visibility of partner’s classes.
Professional Scrum Developer courses teach students how to turn product requirements into potentially shippable increments of software. Scrum traditionally avoids providing guidance for engineering practices. This course fills that void by addressing what developers do with the remaining 7 hours and 45 minutes of their day after the daily Scrum meeting. Classes are exercise-driven, where students work in teams and develop “done” increments from product backlog items. Each class is five days long, and classes can be either public or private.
All Professional Scrum Developer courses cover three main topics:
- Scrum. PSD courses cover Scrum Fundamentals like Scrum roles, artifacts, and timeboxes. The course simulates being part of a Scrum team to expose students to these concepts in action. Students learn how to work as part of a Scrum team, which requires them to understand techniques for self-organization. At the end of the course students develop skills in identifying and eliminate typical types of Scrum team dysfunction.
- Tools. PSD courses teach students how to leverage different development tools to employ Scrum practices. PSD .NET courses are taught in the context of Visual Studio 2010 using the Microsoft Scrum process template and add-ins such as Urban Turtle. Students learn how to map specific tool features and functions to the general Scrum practices they must use to be effective team members.
- Practices. PSD courses cover all of the technical practices that team members need to successfully implement and ship functionality. These include coding practices like test-driven development, continuous integration, and refactoring; architecture practices such as emergent architecture and evolutionary database development; release management practices like planning, requirements definition, and deploying, and quality assurance practices from defining “done” to pair programming to version control to acceptance testing.
Aaron Skonnard, founder of Pluralsight explains why they joined this Urban Turtle initiative:
“Any initiatives that eases adoption of proven engineering practices with Microsoft technologies will always gain support from Pluralsight”
We asked Adam Cogan, Chief Architect for SSW and Microsoft Regional Director, who teaches the PSD .NET course all around the globe, what his thoughts on Urban Turtle were. He said:
“Mario one of the high value take-aways the students tell me they get, is seeing some of the great third party TFS tools in action. That’s why I ensure I demonstrate Urban Turtle, so they see Team Web Access providing awesome value, and it eases adoption of Scrum with the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum process template”
Then we have Richard Hundhausen, Accentient’s president, who in cooperation with Microsoft and Ken schwaber, created the Professional Scrum Developer .NET training course says
“I has not yet met a certified PSD trainer who did not want to be listed as a friend of the Turtle”
When registering students for a PSD .NET course to get up to 100% off your Urban Turtle license cost, all you have to do is register for one of the training sessions listed here http://urbanturtle.com/?item=professional-scrum-developer. Make sure to mention your Urban Turtle license when registering. Your discount will be applied to your training fees. For more information on the curriculum of the Professional Scrum Developer program visit http://www.scrum.org/psd-net-syllabus/
