Essential Skills For Agile Development

Agile Development, in particular, eXtreme Programming (XP), has been gaining a lot of momentum because it can effectively address the problems plaguing software development. In 2002, we, the Macau Productivity and Technology Center (CPTTM), started to hold courses on XP and OO design to teach the skills in agile development. At the beginning, we hired a well known software training and consulting company to teach. While the instructor was very professional and instructive and the feedbacks from the students were very good, the students didn't acquire the skills taught. We knew that it was because the concepts involved were abstract and it needed far more exercises for the students to practice in order to acquire the skills. Therefore, we decided to develop our enhanced training materials. In particular, we selected only 20% of the skills in agile development that deliver 80% of the value, while ignoring those useful but non-essential skills. Then we explained these skills in terms of examples and added a lot of real world examples as exercises. After adopting this set of materials, the new students really acquired the skills taught. Now we have organized the training materials into a book: Essential Skills for Agile Development. This book covers the essential skills in: OO design, Test Driven Development (TDD), team development, planning, communication and pair programming.