New DDD training events in Bologna

The first dates for Domain Driven Design classes in Bologna are finally published!

• 1 introduction day, targeted to who want's to know what DDD is, on February 8th (info & registration)
• 4 days of workshop from February 9th to 12th for practitioners that want to dig deeper and discuss (info & registration)

The events will take place in Savoia Regency Hotel (well known to participants of last Italian Agile Day). Early bird till January 15th, and special discounts for Bologna XPUG menbers.

Scrum Introduction with Peter Stevens

As a satellite event to the 2009 Italian Agile Day in Bologna, I'll be helping Peter Stevens in the one day Introduction to Scrum that'll take place in Bologna on November 19th, right before the IAD.

Peter is a seasoned Scrum trainer based in Switzerland, and helping companies in different countries. More info could be found on his blog Scrum Breakfast.

Peter speaks quite a good Italian, we thought that the best combination would be to keep the teaching part in English, and question time in Italian. But ...I guess this would be an emerging behaviour as well.

By the way, Agile Day participants will get a 20% discount on the full price.

Getting Domain Driven

Last weeks have been especially busy, so I wasn’t able to post that much. This doesn’t mean that nothing happened to me in the meanwhile...

In September I attended to Craig Larman’s Agile Project Management training, which I am supposed to take over in 2009, together with Allan Kelly, for Skills Matter.

Wasn’t it enough, in October I certified for Eric Evans’ Domain Driven Design class, which I just co-taught last week, together with Gojko Adzic, and Eric Evans himself. As the previous experience (where I acted as an active student), this one was also really pleasant and interesting at the same time. All of the people attending where somewhat special, and questions were really interesting and let us get quite a bit of their unique perspective too. When classes are that interesting it’s hard to say who learned most, but going home satisfied after a hard work, (and a couple of beers) is definitely rewarding.
Also, we started collaborating on the training material and structure, together with Hans Dockter, who'll be joining us as a trainer in 2009, in a very open and collaborative way. It's great to be part of such a team!

At the same time I started beating the drum of DDD also in Italy with my first article on the subject, which has been published by Mokabyte some days ago. Since DDD is one of the IT related topics that I found most interesting over these years, I am pretty excited about the whole matter. By the way, writing about DDD is also extremely challenging. Eric carefully weighted every single word in hs book, which is actually a careful distillation of DDD principles. My writing style is basically the opposite: I write a lot, I digress, I make a lot of (hopefully) funny examples just to make a small point. Maybe I'll be able to deliver the message, maybe not.
I am eager for feedback anyway ;-)

Back from the Scrum Master Certification Class

I'm just back from a Scrum Master Certification Class, taught by author of "Applying UML and Patterns" Craig Larman. I have to admit I am pretty happy with the outcome: even if was not new to many of the topic presented, the course used the books as a starting point and covered many issues related to setting up Scrum, and common pitfalls that might be encountered along the way.

As it often happens, the trip is more interesting than the destination: reading a book one may have the idea of Scrum and Agile as a green field. Well, it might be so …once you manage to get there. But getting there might actually be a trial-and-error process: one might have to answer questions which are not answered in the books, and there is no dogmatic or one-size-fits-all answer. The most tricky ones are definitely "questions you shouldn't answer", meaning that just asking the question is wrong, but it takes a lot of confidence and guts to answer "Your question is not meaningful", or "I must not answer to this question" especially the asking person is your customer or your boss…

As always, the side effect of these trainings is also that interesting people gather in the same place, and so interesting conversation might happen in the coffee breaks.

Tags: agile, scrum, training