Gathering and Modelling Software Requirements (Course Ref: SS-02)

Dates: Tue 8th & Wed 9th July 2008
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Fee: Members €320, Non members €500
Max. number of participants: 8

Overview

This workshop course teaches students how to create, elaborate and review business, user, and software requirements. The course includes best practices for eliciting, analyzing, specifying and verifying requirements. Students also learn how to decompose requirements into features, and how to deal with changes after sign-off.

Audience

Software Process Architects, QA/Test Managers, Development Managers, Business Analysts, QA User Testers, Software Developers, Project Managers, QA Code Testers, User Education Specialists

At course completion

After completing this course, students will be able to:

Recognise stakeholder patterns
Review and update specs
Define vision and scope
Discuss specs in feature teams
Elicit and articulate requirements
Deal with open issues
Analyze and prioritize
Create traceability of spec items
Decide on the benefits of prototyping
Design a proper repository for documents

Course Outline

Module 1: Introduction to requirements engineering
Problems, objectives, requirements and specifications
Classification of requirement types
Business requirements
User requirements
Software requirements

Module 2: Requirements framework
The requirements development pipeline
Integration of requirements in the SDLC
Dealing with unknown needs
Tailoring the process for Agile environments
Traceability and metrics

Module 3: Project scope and business requirements
Defining the business context
Breaking the scope into logical sets of capabilities
Assigning and agreeing upon stakeholder roles
Building the business case
Establishing business areas, goals and requirements
Framing requirements to support business strategy and customer justification.

Module 4: Elicitation
Identification of sources
Identification of stakeholders
Requirements workshops
Elicitation techniques
The voice of the customer

Module 5: Analysis
Requirements prioritization and scrubbing
Improving requirements through prototyping
Bridging from existing to new functionality using a gap analysis
Engineering assessment

Module 6: Specification
Use case development
Requirements for multiple audiences
Document layout and structure
Non-functional requirements

Module 7: Validation and verification
Review sessions and fit criteria
Dealing with dependencies and inconsistencies
Verification through test case design
Negotiating conflicting requirements

Module 8: Requirements management
Storage and privileges
Linking and accessing requirements
Version control and addendums
Making requirements traceable

Module 9: Requirements breakdown
From requirements to feature breakdowns
Software development planning
Organization of spec items
Committing features to releases

Module 10: Managing changes
Dealing with new ideas
Sources of requirements changes
Controlling and enabling change
Mechanisms to support triaging

Module 11: Tools support
Available tools
Evaluation criteria
Case: Atlassian Confluence wiki

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Software Product Management (Course Ref: SS-03)

Dates: Tue 24th & Wed 25th June 2008 NEW DATE
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 8

Effective product management is imperative to all software companies, both small and large. Successful products attract the best sales and attract the right talent to your organisation to ensure that growth and success continues.

A 2-day course in modular format with interactive sessions, sharing real-life experiences to develop a new vision for Product Management.

Aims

How to share a singular vision for your markets and product across the company
Creating and sharing the customer value proposition
Achieving shared product ownership across the organisation
Using the Product Roadmap to reassure and excite your customers
Matching business resource plans to your product life-cycles

Objectives

This course gives Product Management professionals the tools needed to drive revenue growth in their organisations through market-led product strategy, positioning the organisations solutions to deliver on their maximum market potential.

Through the introduction of the programme process, this course will show how product management creates a focus on customer need, prioritising resources and planning across the organisation, aligning the goals of the sales, marketing, services and product development departments.

Day 1

Introduction - What is Product Management
The role of the Product Manager
Key Components of Product Management (Evaluation, Delivery, Go-To-Market, Measurement)
Self-Assessment
Games and Case Studies

Day 2

Product Lifecycle Management
Introduction to Product Programmes
Making it work
How to manage products and achieve change through programmes
Developing a Product Management Action Plan
Survival Kit for Product Management

Who Should Attend?

The course is designed for Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers as well as Directors of Sales, Marketing, Product, CTOs and other executives interested in harnessing the value of product management in their companies.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Selling Into Large Organisations (Course Ref: SS-04)

Dates: Tue 17th & Wed 18th June 08
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 8

This "Selling Into Large Organisations" course will be a highly focused approach for Software Skillnet and will centre on the current business issues that confront the existing mix of Sales Executives, Account Managers and Product Managers in relation to selling, opportunity-qualifying, contract gain and implementation processes.

The overall programme will emphasise the professional, people-to-people elements of selling in to large organisations - Prospecting Intelligently, Qualifying Pipelines, Building (and maintaining) Relationships, using Advanced Communication Skills and understanding the importance of driving the pipeline opportunities forward against the buyers 'Decision Criteria' in a professional manner. Most importantly, this programme will look at the sales process from the buyers' viewpoint - and concentrates on having as much clarity as possible as to what the decision criteria is all about within each sales opportunity. Throughout the programme the fundamental concepts of leading sales techniques are examined and compared.

Ideal role of participant:

Any sales person who is or will be selling complex products or services, 'big ticket' sales or any product or service that is strategic to the growth of participating company. It is suitable for new sales people or those who have been selling for some time but who feel that the basic skills that they were previously taught could be revisited.

Attendee will learn How To:

Adopt a systematic and strategic approach to selling and gaining new business.
Understand the sales skills required for success in the ICT technologies and services marketplace.
Understand the importance of rigorous qualification.
Be better able to recognise and influence the decision criteria (why people buy).
Develop an 'Account Development & Protection' approach to selling.
Be better able to negotiate a professional outcome that is right for the customer and the supplier.
Be more objective and self-disciplined in setting sales objectives, managing 'time' and forecasting

Content

Selling Software Products & Services
- The Changing Role of the S/W salesperson
- The Purpose & The Objective of Selling
- The 'Long' Sell V The 'Short' Sell
- The Trusted Advisor Role
The Buying/Selling Process
- The Buyers Cycle
- The Salesperson's Response
- The Professional Sales Call - SAPO
Planning & Preparation
- Understanding Your ISPs
- Value Statement Libraries
- Juran's 'Truth
Prospecting and Getting The Appointment
- Prospecting Techniques
- Getting the Appointment
Qualification Techniques (and how to use them)
- Qualifying & Long Term Assessment
- Is it worth it? / Can I Win?
- The Sales Funnel
- Pipeline Management
- The 5 Keys to Sales Effectiveness
Selling to 'Different' Customer Types
- Buyer Types/Buyer Motives
- Deciding on Your Response
- The Customer Relationship
- Understanding Organisational Needs and Personal
Communicating During The Needs Analysis Process
- Understanding Sales Communication Skills
- Working With The Buyer's Perception
- Questioning/Listening To Influence
- The 'PI' Questioning Technique
Decision Criteria (Why 'buyers' Buy)
- How To Influence The Decision Process
- Handling Customer Concerns
- Report Writing & Responding To ITTs, RFPs RFIs etc
Gaining The Order
- Closing - How Important Is It?
- Getting Commitment
- The Fear Of Rejection
Professional Negotiating (Win-Win)
- The Process of Negotiation
- Difference between Selling and Negotiation
- The Fundamentals Of Why Negotiations Fail
- The Psychology Of Bargaining
- Tricks & Tactics
- Tips and Techniques
Account Management & Protection
- Managing Perceptions and Expectations
- Exploiting Good Customer Service
- Territory & Account Responsibilities
Account Development Strategies (ADS)
- Determine the Factors - Plus and Minus - that affect the Outcome of your Sales
- Develop Strategies that Maximise your Market Penetration and Protect your Existing Accounts
- How to Sell in Partnership with each Account, Establish Calls and Long Term Business Objectives for New accounts

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Implementing Agile Methodology (Course Ref: SS-05)

Dates: Thu 3rd & Fri 4th July 08
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 8

Overview

10 years ago the word “Agile” for a software development process had not been coined. 5 years ago a few early adopters were reporting successful projects. Today many organizations – some traditionally very conservative – are adopting an agile process. Why?

As the pace of change in the wider business world accelerates, the inventory of legacy systems grows and the desire to create business advantage through IT strengthens, many organizations have come under pressure to find a better way to deliver systems.

Agile offers the potential to create a software delivery vehicle that responds much faster and works more effectively with the wider business environment.

Audience and prerequisites

This course is applicable to people in any role involved with software development, including senior managers, team leads, project managers, programmers, testers and business analysts.

The course illustrates the theory and practice of agile software development so previous involvement in software projects is a prerequisite.

Some modules cover technical ground but the objective in each is to illustrate in broad terms how the technique works. Deep technical understanding will therefore not be required.

Format

The course blends tutorial, class discussion, question and answer sessions, and demonstrations/ simulations.

Objectives

Learn why agile development has come to the fore in the last decade
Understand the fundamental mindset shift behind agile processes
Explore the problems and opportunities agile processes present
Learn the advances in technical and management practices that act as enablers for agile processes

Potential benefits of an agile approach
- Earlier ROI
- Lower failure risk
- Better project management
- Closer customer relationship
- Higher quality
- Greater sustainability
- More appropriate deliverables
- Caveat: “there are no silver bullets”
Comparison with traditional (waterfall-inspired) processes
- Comparing process models
- Differences in value streams
- Managing issues with rework
Common features of agile processes
- Dividing projects into iterations
- Timeboxing
- Regular planning
- Requirements are the primary units of work
- Emphasis on quality, sustainability
Requirements handling
- “Stories”: the units of requirements
- Stories as placeholders and as units of work
- Scope minimization
- Acceptance criteria
- Handling dependencies
- Estimation
Iteration management
- Iteration planning
- Prioritization
- Requirements queues
- Iteration tracking
- Development velocity
- Burn-down charts
- Tracking stories in play
- States of a story (queued, played, in progress, done)
The Scrum process
- Scrum process walk-through
- Terminology primer
- Scrum roles
Scrum process simulation
- Learn more about the Scrum process by trying it on a non-technical mini-project
Efficiency and effectiveness
- The cost of context switching
- Being on only 1 team at a time
- Working on only 1 thing at a time
- Why that doesn't imply working on only 1 project at a time
- Finishing each task before starting another
- Minimizing the scope of each task
- Tracking each task
- Working directly with others
- Avoiding intermediate work-products
- Having work-products do double duty
Leading edge technical practices
- Flattening the cost of change curve
- Unit test-driven development
- Acceptance test-driven development
- Refactoring
- Continuous integration
Process mapping and agile adoption
- Mapping what you have to an agile process
- The adoption process
- Best practices, pitfalls and case studies

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Prince 2 Foundation (Course Ref: SS-08)

Dates: Mon 16th – Wed 18th June 08 NEW DATE
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 9.00am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 8

Overview

PRINCE2™ (Projects IN a Controlled Environment) is a leading edge approach to managing projects. With the launch of PRINCE2™ also came its recognition as the de facto standard for managing projects, not just in the IT/IS environment, but for projects of any size and complexity, run in any industry sector. In support of this recognition, The APM Group offer a certification programme accredited by UKAS on behalf of OGC. This course conforms to the syllabus set down by the APM Group for delegates wishing to gain PRINCE2 Foundation certification. ESMI is accredited for PRINCE2.

Target Student

This is an intensive three-day course leading to delegates sitting the PRINCE2™ Foundation examination on the final day. This course is aimed at anyone wishing to gain the qualification and needing to understand the terminology and principles behind the method.

This course would benefit:

Project Managers
General Managers
Programme Managers
Project Team Managers and support staff
Staff who will have a defined role
Project Management Consultants

Delivery Method

Instructor-led, group-paced, classroom-delivery learning model with structured hands-on activities. The course has a significant aspect of syndicate work in a case study environment; to give a sound understanding of project based work according to PRINCE2™. The course also prepares the candidate for the examination, which leads to the Foundation Certificate in Project Management, administered by the APM Group.

Course Content:

This course follows the syllabus set down by the APM Group in order to prepare delegates to pass the PRINCE2™ Foundation Paper.

Day 1:

Introduction to Project Management
Overview of PRINCE2™
Starting up a project
The Project Management Team

Day 2:

Initiating a project
The Business Case
Risk and Quality Management
All aspects of Planning
Controls

Day 3:

Managing Stage Boundaries
Quality in a PE Controlling a Stage
Managing Product Delivery
Change Control
Configuration Management and Project Closure
Foundation Exam

Documentation:

Comprehensive course documentation is provided, including a copy of the OGC’s “Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2” Examination Preparation: Delegates must undertake a period of self-study using materials provided before the course. In addition there is a requirement for evening work to be completed throughout the course. The Foundation examination, a one-hour multiple choice questionnaire exam, takes place in the afternoon of the third day.

Performance-Based Objectives

Lesson objectives help students become comfortable with the course, and also provide a means to evaluate learning.

Upon successful completion of this course, students have:

Gained a basic knowledge and understanding of project management and project-based work.
Identified the difference between a project and a process.
Been introduced to the components, elements and processes of PRINCE2™ and the relationships that bind them together.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Prince 2 Practitioner Upgrade (Course Ref: SS-09)

Dates: Thu 19th - Fri 20th June 08 NEW DATE
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 9.00am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 8

Overview:

PRINCE2™ (Projects IN a Controlled Environment) is a leading edge approach to managing projects. With the launch of PRINCE2™ also came its recognition as the de facto standard for managing projects, not just in the IT/IS environment, but for projects of any size and complexity, run in any industry sector. In support of this recognition, The APM Group offer a certification programme accredited by UKAS on behalf of OGC. ESMI are accredited to run the PRINCE 2 Practitioner. This course conforms to the syllabus set down by the APM Group for delegates wishing to gain PRINCE2™ Practitioner certification.

Target Student:

This course is aimed at anyone wishing to gain the qualification, ideally having already attended the PRINCE2™ Foundation course.

This course would benefit:

Project Managers
General Managers
Programme Managers
Project Team Managers and support staff
Staff who will have a defined role
Project Management Consultants

Delivery Method:

Instructor-led, group-paced, classroom-delivery learning model with structured hands-on activities. The course prepares the candidate for the examination, which leads to the Practitioners Certificate in Project Management, administered by the APM Group.

Course Content:

This course covers a high level overview of the qualification syllabus set down by the APM Group. Delegates are given past exams papers to practice exam technique in order to prepare delegates to sit the PRINCE2™ Practitioner Paper.

Day 1:

Review of PRINCE2™
Case Study Exercises
Practitioner Exam Techniques

Day 2:

Exam Preparation
Practitioner Exam

Documentation:

Comprehensive course documentation is provided, including a copy of the OGC’s “Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2”

Pre-Requisites:

Delegates will need a good understanding of PRINCE2™ and have attended the PRINCE2™ Foundation course first. Anyone sitting the PRINCE2™ Practitioner examination must have passed the PRINCE2™ Foundation examination. Examination Preparation: Delegates must undertake a period of self-study using materials provided before the course. In addition there is a requirement for evening work to be completed throughout the course. The Practitioner examination, a three-hour written paper, takes place in the afternoon of the second day.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Communications for non Irish Technical Professionals (Ref: SS-11)

Dates: Autumn 2008 (Date tbc)
Venue: Dublin, Carr Communications, Northumberland Road
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 8

Course Objective

Foreign nationals coming to live and work in Ireland face many challenges to adapt and succeed in the Irish working environment. In addition to learning to operate in a new language (or version of English), overseas employees must also adjust to new social and business practices. An employee selected for an international assignment may be extremely competent and successful in their home country environment - where they know all the rules, subtleties and nuances of interacting on both a social and professional level. This, however, may not be the case when they are seconded to Ireland. A new set of rules has to be learnt and assimilated with failure to do so possibly impacting on their professional and personal life. The aim of this course is to equip participants with the skills to communicate effectively while managing cultural differences.

Participant Types

Any non Irish Individual who would like to advance their communication skills and gain insight into Irish culture and society.

Course modules include but are not confined to:

Understanding what makes good communication
Listening skills
Intercultural communication
Getting things done the 'Irish' way
History of Ireland and Irish social cultures

At the end of this course participants will:

Be able to identify what to concentrate on in preparing for a piece of communication.
Take away from the session clear preparation guidelines.
Know how to structure and pace speech for maximum impact
Understand the value of strong opening and closing elements in presentation and communication scenarios
Be able to choose examples and illustrations to create understanding
Know how to handle complex data to achieve clarity and comprehension
Be able to deal effectively with questions and comments
Know how to communicate effectively, internally and externally
Be able to listen effectively
Use visuals aids, including PowerPoint, to best effect
Be able to cope with nerves, problems with delivery and issues relating to personal presentation
Have a developed insight and understanding into the Irish culture

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Staff Appraisals (Course Ref: SS-14)

Dates: Tue 1st July 2008
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 8

Performance appraisals are essential for the effective management and evaluation of staff. Appraisals help develop individuals, improve organizational performance, and feed into business planning. The activity is a two-way process and both parties should be able to have frank exchange of views on past performance, how appraisees can improve their performance, the support they need and their aspirations for their future career. This course will develop the key skills needed to give appraisals in a way that enhances employee motivation, increases productivity and makes the appraisal process stress-free. Emphasis is on people-to-people communication and attendees will learn how a coaching approach can be used to gain commitment from those they are apprising.

Ideal Role of Participant

The course is applicable to anyone from companies introducing an appraisal process or those from companies with an established appraisal process and want to develop their appraisal skills.

By The End of the Course Delegates Will Be Able To:

Give appraisals in a way that clarifies performance requirements, develops motivation, increases productivity and makes the appraisal process stress-free.

Content

Introduction

Why do Appraisals?
Structuring an Appraisal
Preparing for The Appraisal
Identifying Development Needs

Communicating in The Appraisal

Building Rapport and Trust
Listening & Questioning
Positive Feedback Skills
Critical Feedback Skills
Clarifying Performance Expectations

Gaining Commitment and Agreement

Increasing Motivation
Using A Coaching Approach
The GROW Model

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Effective Technical Writing (Course Ref: SS-16)

Dates: Mon 23rd June 2008
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 8

The aim of this course is to develop awareness of and skill in, writing about technical subjects, so that any form of written communication is clear and easy to understand. The course comprises a combination of lectures and workshops.

Who Should Attend:

Technical professionals

Attendee will learn:

Create a logical, well-argued structure for any piece of communication
Write clear paragraphs and sentences with greater ease
Correct and edit difficult sections of text
Make use of the conventions governing the basic forms in the technical genre
Produce communicative tables and figures and use layout effectively in a document
Use punctuation correctly
Avoid the most common grammatical errors

Content

Development Strategies

Forming a Point of View
Identifying Audiences and Purposes
Writing as a team

Forms of Professional Communication

The Writing Cycle - From Pre-Feasibility to Documentation
Basic features of a Report
The Proposal and Terms of Reference
Manuals and Documentation

Skill in Writing

Choosing the right word
Listing in parallel
Simplifying sentence structure
Writing Paragraphs
Editing for Emphasis

Production Elements

Visual Aids
Proof-Reading
A Guide to Punctuation and Grammar

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Java Technologies Advanced Practitioner (Course Ref: SS-17)

Dates: Wed 4th – Fri 6th June 08
Venue: Dublin, Guinness Enterprise Centre
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 8

Outline

This course is for programmers with a good basic knowledge of Java, and is designed to introduce more advanced features related to the language, as well as some of the commonly used frameworks available to aid in application development. The topics listed here are available to be selected for inclusion in the course depending on specific requirements that delegates may have, or particular areas that customers may wish to explore. It is unlikely that all of the topics could be covered in a single course. We can of course provide advice as to any dependencies amongst the topics.

Training Course Prerequisites

The training course assumes that delegates are already programmers. They will already understand the need for flow control, variables, operators and functions, and indeed have used them in other language contexts.

FORMAT

This training course combines lectures with practical exercises that help the delegates to put what they have learned on the training course into practice. The exercises specifically build on what has been recently taught and are built up as the training course progresses.

OUTLINE CONTENTS

Topics covered:

Effective use of exceptions;
Reflection, class loading and their use in constructing flexible, dynamic applications;
Tuning and interacting with the Java VM Garbage Collector;
Building effective multithreaded applications;
Advanced concurrency features in Java 5;
Programming with Generics;
Instrumenting Java applications for management and performance monitoring;
Java performance hints and tips;
Unit testing using JUnit;
Design Patterns and Java;
Persistence using the Java Persistence Architecture and Hibernate;
Building applications using the Spring framework;
Spring MVC as a framework for web applications;
Introduction to Aspect Oriented Programming with Java;

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Recent Trends in AJAX technology, David Crane Masterclass (Course Ref: SS-19)

Dates: Thu 26th June 2008
Venue: Cork, Cork International Airport Hotel
Times: 8.30am – 1.00pm
Max. number of participants: 60

Course Overview

David Crane of Neueda Technologies will address recent trends in Ajax technology, and look at how Ajax has disrupted the world of web development in terms of the programming model, client- and server-side architectures, user interface and workflow, and the market for web applications. Several hands-on examples and demonstrations will be provided, including the use of 'mash-ups' to access public web services from within your application, and how to push data from the server to the browser."

Presenter

Dave Crane, author of Ajax in Action and well known expert in the field of DHTML and Ajax development on digital TV set-top boxes, in home automation and banking and financial systems, designed, developed and regularly delivers intensive and highly practical Ajax training courses. Ajax exploded on the scene in the spring of 2005 when a web site defined the term and Google released Google Maps and GMail, powerful examples of what Ajax can do. Ajax uses familiar web technologies - DHTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript - in radically different ways resulting in a much richer user experience.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Recent Trends in AJAX technology, David Crane Masterclass (Course Ref: SS-20)

Dates: Wed 25th June 08
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 2.00pm – 6.00pm
Max. number of participants: 40

Course Overview

David Crane of Neueda Technologies will address recent trends in Ajax technology, and look at how Ajax has disrupted the world of web development in terms of the programming model, client- and server-side architectures, user interface and workflow, and the market for web applications. Several hands-on examples and demonstrations will be provided, including the use of 'mash-ups' to access public web services from within your application, and how to push data from the server to the browser."

Presenter

Dave Crane, author of Ajax in Action and well known expert in the field of DHTML and Ajax development on digital TV set-top boxes, in home automation and banking and financial systems, designed, developed and regularly delivers intensive and highly practical Ajax training courses. Ajax exploded on the scene in the spring of 2005 when a web site defined the term and Google released Google Maps and GMail, powerful examples of what Ajax can do. Ajax uses familiar web technologies - DHTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript - in radically different ways resulting in a much richer user experience.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Software testing ISTQB Foundation Course (Course Ref: SS-21)

Dates: Tue 29th – Thu 31st July 2008
Venue: Cork, Cork International Airport Hotel
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants:12

Background & Objectives

The ISTQB was officially founded as an International Testing Qualifications Board in Edinburgh in November 2002, by members of the ISEB Software testing Board together with representatives from other countries. The idea and proposal for the ISTQB, stemmed from the original ISEB view of Software Testing and the need for an international Software Testing Qualification. The International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) role is to support a single, universally accepted, international qualification scheme, aimed at software and system testing professionals. The ISTQB Foundation certificate is awarded to all those who successfully complete a one-hour, multiple choice examination. The examination is externally set and invigilated by ISEB. In the future it is anticipated that there will be an advanced ISTQB level comparable to ISEB Practitioner but for now the ISEB Practitioner remains as the key advanced test certification.

Who Should Attend

Quality analysts
Testers
Developers
Systems analysts
Project leaders
Users
Data administrators

No specific prerequisites are assumed. Attendees are expected to be 'software knowledgeable' with some minimal test of software experience.

Benefits of Attending

Those attending the course will learn:

The fundamental principles of Software Testing
How testing fits into the development lifecycle
The importance of test process, objectives, techniques and tools
Essential functional and non-functional test methods
Basic test design and measurement techniques
Fundamental test management principles
How to select and implement tools effectively

Programme

Introduction
- Fundamentals of Testing
- Why is testing necessary?
- What is testing?
- General testing principles
- Fundamental test process
- The psychology of testing
Part Two: Testing through the lifecycle
- Software development models
- Test levels
- Test types – the targets of testing
- Maintenance testing
Part Three: Static Reviews
- Reviews and the test process
- Review process
- Static analysis by tools
Part Four: Test design techniques
- Identifying test conditions and designing test cases
- Categories of test design techniques
- Specification-based or black-box techniques
- Structure-based or white-box techniques
- Experience-based techniques
Part Five: Test Management
- Test Organisation
- Test planning and estimation
- Test process monitoring and control
- Configuration Management
- Risk and Testing
- Incident Management
Part Six: Tool Support for Testing
- Types of test tool
- Effective use of tools: potential benefits and risks
- Introduction of a tool into an organisation
Examination Coaching
- ISTQB examination - Externally invigilated by ISEB

This comprehensive introduction to software testing provides you with the knowledge and expertise to undertake the ISTQB examination for the Foundation Certificate offered at the end of the third day.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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.NET Futures, Dave Sussman Masterclass (Course Ref: SS-24)

Dates: Tue 20th May 08
Venue: Dublin, Clarion Hotel, IFSC
Times: 2.00pm – 6.00pm
Max. number of participants: 40

Objectives

Keeping up with the fast pace of product change is hard for anyone, let alone developers whose full time job is write and maintain software. In an environment where it is not practical to trial new products, let alone beta software, it's still important to keep abreast of new and upcoming technologies. This seminar concentrates on the new features found in Microsoft's ASP.NET, looking at Visual Studio 2008, new data query capabilities, and next generation media experiences.

Who should attend

Developers wishing to gain an insight into how ASP.NET and data access methodologies are changing in new and future releases. Many of the topics shown will have an important impact on how Web applications are created and architected. Attendees should have basic knowledge of ASP.NET and Visual Studio

Content

What's New in Visual Studio 2008
Visual Studio 2008, currently in beta but due for release before Christmas, contains a number of enhancements to make it the number one tool for developers, including enhanced JavaScript support, new controls, an enhanced designer with good CSS supoprt, and multi-targeting.
New Language Features
.NET 3.5 brings new language features, including LINQ, anonymous types, type inference, object initialisers and extension methods.
ASP.NET Dynamic Data Controls
Currently in beta in the ASP.NET Ajax Futures, the Dynamic Data Controls provide automatic scaffolding for data driven websites. A new version of these provides unrivalled flexibility for allowing data pages to be created with minimal code.
Language Integrated Query and Entity Data Framework
Object Relationship Mapping provides an object-based interface to data and is a common feature of many development projects. The Entity Data Framework (EDF) is Microsoft's solution to object mapping, and Language Integrated Query (LINQ) provides simple data querying directly from within C# and VB.
ASP.NET MVC Framework
The ASP.NET postback model was a radical step for web applications when it was released, and is now commonplace. Applications however, are becoming more complex, and provides some challenges to testing. The new ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) framework provides a clear separation between the aspects of ASP.NET pages, allowing for cleaner code, easier and faster testing, and powerful and flexible URL mapping.
ASP.NET and Silverlight
Silverlight allows Web applications to deliver the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. While much of the focus has been on media experiences, Silverlight also integrates with ASP.NET, allowing interaction with server controls, providing richer user experiences.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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.NET Futures, Dave Sussman Masterclass (Course Ref: SS-25)

Dates: Wed 21st May 08
Venue: Cork, Cork International Airport Hotel
Times: 2.00pm – 6.00pm
Max. number of participants: 60

Objectives

Keeping up with the fast pace of product change is hard for anyone, let alone developers whose full time job is write and maintain software. In an environment where it is not practical to trial new products, let alone beta software, it's still important to keep abreast of new and upcoming technologies. This seminar concentrates on the new features found in Microsoft's ASP.NET, looking at Visual Studio 2008, new data query capabilities, and next generation media experiences.

Who should attend

Developers wishing to gain an insight into how ASP.NET and data access methodologies are changing in new and future releases. Many of the topics shown will have an important impact on how Web applications are created and architected. Attendees should have basic knowledge of ASP.NET and Visual Studio

Content

What's New in Visual Studio 2008
Visual Studio 2008, currently in beta but due for release before Christmas, contains a number of enhancements to make it the number one tool for developers, including enhanced JavaScript support, new controls, an enhanced designer with good CSS supoprt, and multi-targeting.
New Language Features
.NET 3.5 brings new language features, including LINQ, anonymous types, type inference, object initialisers and extension methods.
ASP.NET Dynamic Data Controls
Currently in beta in the ASP.NET Ajax Futures, the Dynamic Data Controls provide automatic scaffolding for data driven websites. A new version of these provides unrivalled flexibility for allowing data pages to be created with minimal code.
Language Integrated Query and Entity Data Framework
Object Relationship Mapping provides an object-based interface to data and is a common feature of many development projects. The Entity Data Framework (EDF) is Microsoft's solution to object mapping, and Language Integrated Query (LINQ) provides simple data querying directly from within C# and VB.
ASP.NET MVC Framework
The ASP.NET postback model was a radical step for web applications when it was released, and is now commonplace. Applications however, are becoming more complex, and provides some challenges to testing. The new ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) framework provides a clear separation between the aspects of ASP.NET pages, allowing for cleaner code, easier and faster testing, and powerful and flexible URL mapping.
ASP.NET and Silverlight
Silverlight allows Web applications to deliver the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. While much of the focus has been on media experiences, Silverlight also integrates with ASP.NET, allowing interaction with server controls, providing richer user experiences.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Java Technologies Advanced Practitioner (Course Ref: SS-27)

Dates: Mon 23rd – Wed 25th June 08
Venue: Cork, Pilz Ireland, Business & Technology Park, Model Farm Rd, Cork
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 8

Outline

This course is for programmers with a good basic knowledge of Java, and is designed to introduce more advanced features related to the language, as well as some of the commonly used frameworks available to aid in application development. The topics listed here are available to be selected for inclusion in the course depending on specific requirements that delegates may have, or particular areas that customers may wish to explore. It is unlikely that all of the topics could be covered in a single course. We can of course provide advice as to any dependencies amongst the topics.

Training Course Prerequisites

The training course assumes that delegates are already programmers. They will already understand the need for flow control, variables, operators and functions, and indeed have used them in other language contexts.

FORMAT

This training course combines lectures with practical exercises that help the delegates to put what they have learned on the training course into practice. The exercises specifically build on what has been recently taught and are built up as the training course progresses.

OUTLINE CONTENTS

Topics covered:

Effective use of exceptions;
Reflection, class loading and their use in constructing flexible, dynamic applications;
Tuning and interacting with the Java VM Garbage Collector;
Building effective multithreaded applications;
Advanced concurrency features in Java 5;
Programming with Generics;
Instrumenting Java applications for management and performance monitoring;
Java performance hints and tips;
Unit testing using JUnit;
Design Patterns and Java;
Persistence using the Java Persistence Architecture and Hibernate;
Building applications using the Spring framework;
Spring MVC as a framework for web applications;
Introduction to Aspect Oriented Programming with Java;

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Developing with ASP. NET (Course Ref: SS-28)

Dates: Mon 14th – Thu 17th July 2008
Venue: Cork, Hotel tba
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 8

Overview

In this course, you will learn how to use Visual Studio 2005 and Visual C# 2005 to build ASP.NET 2.0 Web pages and XML Web services. You’ll gain an understanding of the new architecture behind ASP.NET 2.0 and how to use the new server controls. You’ll learn to create consistent web sites using Master Pages, to improve performance with output caching, add membership features, configure and deploy ASP.NET applications, to authenticate users and limit their access to resources, direct users using new Site Navigation tools and to handle multi-user data access conflicts.

In this course, you will learn to:

Use ASP.NET server controls to generate HTML and to execute event procedures.
Promote consistency within your web site through Master Pages
Retrieve and manipulate data using ADO.NET.
Display and edit data quickly and easily using new data binding features
Use Membership features to manage your Web users.
Use new Site Navigation controls to direct users within your site
Create and consume XML Web Services.
Take advantage of ASP.NET’s versatile output caching to increase performance.
Add scalability and reliability by setting up an out-of-process session state server.
Create a Web Setup project in Visual Studio to build a deployment package that takes advantage of Windows Installer

Introduction to ASP.NET

A Review of Classic ASP
ASP.NET Web Applications
Rendering HTML with Server Controls
Data Binding in ASP.NET 2.0

What's New in ASP.NET 2.0

New Features in ASP.NET 2.0
Designer Features
Deployment and Configuration Tools
Increasing Productivity
Page Framework and Compilation

Working with Controls

Introduction to Web Controls
Simple Input Controls
HyperLink and Button Controls
List Controls
Controlling Focus

Using Rich Server Controls

Introduction to Rich Controls
The Calendar Control
The AdRotator Control
The XML Control

Accessing Data

Overview of ADO.NET
Connecting to Data
Executing Commands
Working with Data
Choosing an ADO.NET Provider

Configuration

Configuration Overview
Using the Web Site Administration Tool
Programming Configuration Files
Encrypting Configuration Sections

Data Binding

Introducing Data Source Controls
Reading and Write Data Using the SqlDataSource Control
Displaying and Editing Middle-Tier Data using the ObjectDataSource Control
Displaying XML Data Using the XmlDataSource Control

Validating User Input

Overview of ASP.NET Validation Controls
Using the Simple Validators
Using the Complex Validators
Summarizing Results with the ValidationSummary Control
Separating Validation into Validation Groups

Themes and Master Pages

Creating a Consistent Web Site
Master Pages
ASP.NET 2.0 Themes

Page Processing

Posting to other pages
Asynchronous page processing

Site Navigation

Providers and Data Sources
Creating an XML Site Map File
Site Navigation Controls
Using the Site Navigation API
Security Trimming
URL Mapping

Displaying Data with the GridView Control

Introducing the GridView Control
Filter Data in the GridView Control
Allow Users to Select from a DropDownList in the Grid
Add a Hyperlink to the Grid
Deleting a Row and Handling Errors

Managing State

Preserving State in Web Applications
Page-Level State
Using Cookies to Preserve State
ASP.NET Session State
Storing Objects in Session State
Configuring Session State
Setting Up an Out-of-Process State Server
Storing Session State in SQL Server
Using Cookieless Session IDs
Application State

Managing Users with ASP.NET's Membership Features

Introduction to Membership and Roles
Securing websites from unauthorised access
Using Membership Controls
Writing Code to Interact with Membership and Roles
Using the Profile to store user data

Improving Performance with Output Caching

The Importance of Caching
Declarative Page Output Caching
Caching Page Fragments
Post-Cache Substitution
Caching Configuration
SQL Server Cache Invalidation

Using the DataList and Repeater Controls

Overview of List-Bound Controls
Creating a Repeater Control
Creating a DataList Control

Creating and Consuming Web Services

The Motivation for XML Web Services
Creating an XML Web Service with Visual Studio
Designing XML Web Services
Creating Web Service Consumers
Discovering Web Services Using UDDI

Building Rich Client Applications

Introducing AJAX Frameworks
Using Anthem.NET
Using Atlas

Diagnostics and Error Handling

Diagnosing Problems
Using Tracing
Using Health Monitoring

Custom Controls and Custom Output

Creating Custom Controls
Creating custom output with Controls Adapters

Creating Portals using Web Parts

Web Part Zones
Creating Web Parts
Allowing Web Part Modification
Connecting Web Parts

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Use Case Driven Development with UML (Course Ref: SS-22)

Dates: Mon 30th June – Wed 2nd July 2008
Venue: Cork, Snap On Diagnostics, Mallow Road, Cork
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 12

Trainer

Shane O’Neill: Requirements and Business Analysis Specialist.

Shane is an accomplished and successful consultant, mentor and trainer with extensive experience in Business Process Modelling and Improvement, Business Analysis, Requirements Elicitation & Documentation, and UML-based system design.

During his career Shane has assisted many of Ireland’s leading IT groups from the Financial, Telecoms, Defence, public and private sectors, in rolling out more efficient and effective software development lifecycles.

Overview:

Use Case Driven Development with UML (UCDD/UML)presents the concepts and techniques necessary to effectively use system requirements, captured using use cases, to drive the development of a robust design

model.

In this intensive, hands-on workshop, participants learn to apply the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and

fundamental object-oriented analysis and design concepts using the core UML diagrams

• Use Case

• Activity

• Sequence

• Collaboration

• Class

• State

Delegates

This workshop is intended for practitioners who desire an understanding of object-oriented analysis and design concepts using UML, as well as hands-on practical experience applying the techniques. This includes analysts, designers, and software developers.

Objectives

Upon completion of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Apply a use case-driven, architecture-centric process to the development of a robust design model.

• Use the UML to represent the design model.

• Apply the concepts of abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism.

• Understand the different views of a software architecture, the key mechanisms that are defined in support of that architecture, and the effect of the architecture and mechanisms on the produced design.

• Describe some basic design considerations, including the use of patterns.

Topics Covered

• Introduction to Use-Cases

Overview of the basic Use-Case Modelling concepts (Actors, Use-Cases, Associations)

and the associated Requirements Artefacts (Use Case Model, Use Case Specification, Supplementary Specification, Glossary)

• OO Concepts and UML Overview

An overview of the basic OO concepts (Abstraction, Encapsulation, Objects, Classes, Relationships, Polymorphism, Interfaces, Subsystems) and their UML representation

• Use Case Analysis

Techniques for identifying the initial classes from Use-Case Specifications, allocating responsibilities to these classes, describing the required class collaborations to deliver the Use-Case functionality, as well as the class

relationships that must exist to support these collaborations.

• Defining the Architecture

Techniques for defining the initial Architecture for the system. Introduces 3-Tier, MVC, and Layered Architectures.

• Moving from Analysis to Design

Techniques for moving from the initial analysis model produced in Use Case Analysis to the more formal design model

• Implementing Architectural Design Patterns

Refinement of the initial architecture to incorporate key design and implementation patterns for mechanisms such as persistence and security.

• Use Case Design

Techniques for refining the collaborations initially developed during ‘Use Case Analysis’ to incorporate the defined architectural patterns and design elements, as well as techniques for designing the internals of subsystems identified during ‘Analysis to Design’

• Class Design

Techniques for designing the internals of the design classes, including the modelling of any state-controlled behaviour. The refinement of the class relationships and the incorporation of basic patterns are also described.

• Introducing Design Patterns

Introduces some commonly used Design Patterns from the Gang-of-Four (Gamma et al.) book - Singleton, Factory, Abstract Factory, and State

Materials Provided:

Upon attending the UCDD/UML workshop, each student will receive the following:

• Student Manual

• Sample Requirements documentation, if required

Structure & Layout:

Lecture & Exercises.

The workshop is paper based and delivered independently of any CASE tool.

Sample Project:

The workshop comes with a set of sample Requirements, in Use-Case format, which can be used as the basis for the hands-on exercises.

Connecting Web Parts

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Software testing ISTQB Foundation Course (Course Ref: SS-31)

Dates: Tue 8th – Thu 10th July 2008
Venue: Dublin, Venue tbc
Times: 9.00am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants:12

Background & Objectives

The ISTQB was officially founded as an International Testing Qualifications Board in Edinburgh in November 2002, by members of the ISEB Software testing Board together with representatives from other countries. The idea and proposal for the ISTQB, stemmed from the original ISEB view of Software Testing and the need for an international Software Testing Qualification. The International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) role is to support a single, universally accepted, international qualification scheme, aimed at software and system testing professionals. The ISTQB Foundation certificate is awarded to all those who successfully complete a one-hour, multiple choice examination. The examination is externally set and invigilated by ISEB. In the future it is anticipated that there will be an advanced ISTQB level comparable to ISEB Practitioner but for now the ISEB Practitioner remains as the key advanced test certification.

Who Should Attend

Quality analysts
Testers
Developers
Systems analysts
Project leaders
Users
Data administrators

No specific prerequisites are assumed. Attendees are expected to be 'software knowledgeable' with some minimal test of software experience.

Benefits of Attending

Those attending the course will learn:

The fundamental principles of Software Testing
How testing fits into the development lifecycle
The importance of test process, objectives, techniques and tools
Essential functional and non-functional test methods
Basic test design and measurement techniques
Fundamental test management principles
How to select and implement tools effectively

Programme

Introduction
- Fundamentals of Testing
- Why is testing necessary?
- What is testing?
- General testing principles
- Fundamental test process
- The psychology of testing
Part Two: Testing through the lifecycle
- Software development models
- Test levels
- Test types – the targets of testing
- Maintenance testing
Part Three: Static Reviews
- Reviews and the test process
- Review process
- Static analysis by tools
Part Four: Test design techniques
- Identifying test conditions and designing test cases
- Categories of test design techniques
- Specification-based or black-box techniques
- Structure-based or white-box techniques
- Experience-based techniques
Part Five: Test Management
- Test Organisation
- Test planning and estimation
- Test process monitoring and control
- Configuration Management
- Risk and Testing
- Incident Management
Part Six: Tool Support for Testing
- Types of test tool
- Effective use of tools: potential benefits and risks
- Introduction of a tool into an organisation
Examination Coaching
- ISTQB examination - Externally invigilated by ISEB

This comprehensive introduction to software testing provides you with the knowledge and expertise to undertake the ISTQB examination for the Foundation Certificate offered at the end of the third day.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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SoftTest Cluster: Testing in an Agile Environment & Competency Based Tester Qualifications (Course Ref: SS-32)

Dates: Mon 16th June 08
Venue: Dublin, IBEC, 84/86 Lr Baggot St, Confederation House, Dublin 2
Times: 2.00pm – 5.30pm
Fee: Free - please register with Susan Kelly on 1890 876979 or email susan@isa-skillnet.com

SoftTest Ireland

SoftTest Ireland is a Software Testing Special Interest Group – setup to provide a forum for professional testers in Ireland. Softtets Ireland Cluster events are sponsored by the Software Skillnet in 2008. The main aim of this professional network is to facilitate the sharing of knowledge in this discipline. The Softtest events enable anyone who has an interest in the process of software testing to benefit from meeting those in industry with whom they can network, share information and learn from each other. Members of SoftTest Ireland are typically Software Testers, IT Managers, Testing Managers, and Quality Managers within their organisations but are not strictly limited to these roles. The Software Skillnet will run a number of specialised training courses for software testing professionals in 2008.

Testing in an Agile Environment

Speaker:

James Lyndsay

James Lyndsay is a test strategist, based in London. He's been testing since 1986, and has worked independently since setting up Workroom Productions in 1994. As a consultant, he's worked in a variety of businesses and project styles; from retail to telecommunications, from rapidly-evolving internet start-ups to more traditional large-scale enterprise. He's worked to technical requirements for companies that make and sell software, to commercial requirements for companies that buy and use software, and to unexpected requirements everywhere. James was an internal irritant to the ISEB exam process for five years, is a regular speaker and occasional teacher, runs LEWT (the London Exploratory Workshop in Testing) and has won prizes for his papers.

Summary:

It is hard to find a practical approach that allows a professional tester to achieve their full potential in an agile environment. Typical agile practices have characteristic effects on the work of a tester - and the expectations of experienced testers can be at odds with those of other experienced members in an agile team. How can a tester fit into an agile team and offer the best of his or her skills and insight? How does one make - or become - an 'agile tester'?

Using real-life examples, this talk attempts to give a flavour of what it is like to bring a test perspective into an agile project - and what it is like to be on an agile project that has a sudden need for testing skills. The talk will help testers recognise where they are bringing friction to an agile environment, help agile team members recognise where they may be incurring a 'testing debt' and identifies ways that testers can facilitate learning and bring value to an agile project.

Competency Based Tester Qualifications: The next step for the Testing Profession?

Speaker:

Susan Windsor

Susan Windsor is the Managing Director of WMHL Consulting Ltd. in the UK, which specialises in the delivery of strategic testing consulting services. Susan is also Director of Aqastra, which has a focus on retraining business administration staff to become acceptance testers. Until recently, she was also non-exec Chair for Insight Test Services who have offices in Dublin, Galway and the UK and still provides Insight with advisor support. Prior to setting up WMHL, Susan managed the Testing Service business for IBM, delivering software testing within the multinational's business consulting services. Susan has also spoken at many industry conferences in the past, including EuroSTAR in 2005, where she was a keynote speaker.

Summary:

Although the existing certification schemes (ISEB/ISTQB, CSQE etc.) go some way to providing a measure of a tester's knowledge, their highly detailed syllabuses give no measure as to their competence or experience.

Examinations tend to be multiple choice and 'correct' answers are derived from what is written in the syllabus. As a consequence, questions and answers in these exams can't take much account of context or the experience of the candidate. To many people, this implies the schemes and certificates awarded are practically useless. Because the syllabuses are so highly detailed, courses become a commodity, focused on exam passing. Competition in the training marketplace is based on cost and volumes rather than the quality of training.

Unless our industry provides the next step in provision of meaningful qualifications to accurately reflect experience and competence, those who recruit and manage testing staff will continue to depend on inadequate knowledge-based qualifications.

This session suggests that there is increasing demand for training and certification schemes that are based more on competence, rather than memory. What would such schemes look like? We've got some ideas, but we seek your input.

We'll provide a suggested framework that may help structure the measurement of competencies for different roles within testing and some ideas on how this measurement could take place. But wouldn't it be great to move this forward to a scheme that really benefits individuals and our industry?

Work with us in this session and maybe we can identify some of you who would like to get more deeply involved to take this to the next level.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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SoftTest Cluster: Testing in an Agile Environment & Competency Based Tester Qualifications (Course Ref: SS-33)

Dates: Wed 18th June 08
Venue: Cork, Kinglsey Hotel
Times: 9.00am – 12.30pm
Fee: Free - please register with Susan Kelly on 1890 876979 or email susan@isa-skillnet.com

SoftTest Ireland

SoftTest Ireland is a Software Testing Special Interest Group – setup to provide a forum for professional testers in Ireland. Softtets Ireland Cluster events are sponsored by the Software Skillnet in 2008. The main aim of this professional network is to facilitate the sharing of knowledge in this discipline. The Softtest events enable anyone who has an interest in the process of software testing to benefit from meeting those in industry with whom they can network, share information and learn from each other. Members of SoftTest Ireland are typically Software Testers, IT Managers, Testing Managers, and Quality Managers within their organisations but are not strictly limited to these roles. The Software Skillnet will run a number of specialised training courses for software testing professionals in 2008.

Testing in an Agile Environment

Speaker:

James Lyndsay

James Lyndsay is a test strategist, based in London. He's been testing since 1986, and has worked independently since setting up Workroom Productions in 1994. As a consultant, he's worked in a variety of businesses and project styles; from retail to telecommunications, from rapidly-evolving internet start-ups to more traditional large-scale enterprise. He's worked to technical requirements for companies that make and sell software, to commercial requirements for companies that buy and use software, and to unexpected requirements everywhere. James was an internal irritant to the ISEB exam process for five years, is a regular speaker and occasional teacher, runs LEWT (the London Exploratory Workshop in Testing) and has won prizes for his papers.

Summary:

It is hard to find a practical approach that allows a professional tester to achieve their full potential in an agile environment. Typical agile practices have characteristic effects on the work of a tester - and the expectations of experienced testers can be at odds with those of other experienced members in an agile team. How can a tester fit into an agile team and offer the best of his or her skills and insight? How does one make - or become - an 'agile tester'?

Using real-life examples, this talk attempts to give a flavour of what it is like to bring a test perspective into an agile project - and what it is like to be on an agile project that has a sudden need for testing skills. The talk will help testers recognise where they are bringing friction to an agile environment, help agile team members recognise where they may be incurring a 'testing debt' and identifies ways that testers can facilitate learning and bring value to an agile project.

Competency Based Tester Qualifications: The next step for the Testing Profession?

Speaker:

Susan Windsor

Susan Windsor is the Managing Director of WMHL Consulting Ltd. in the UK, which specialises in the delivery of strategic testing consulting services. Susan is also Director of Aqastra, which has a focus on retraining business administration staff to become acceptance testers. Until recently, she was also non-exec Chair for Insight Test Services who have offices in Dublin, Galway and the UK and still provides Insight with advisor support. Prior to setting up WMHL, Susan managed the Testing Service business for IBM, delivering software testing within the multinational's business consulting services. Susan has also spoken at many industry conferences in the past, including EuroSTAR in 2005, where she was a keynote speaker.

Summary:

Although the existing certification schemes (ISEB/ISTQB, CSQE etc.) go some way to providing a measure of a tester's knowledge, their highly detailed syllabuses give no measure as to their competence or experience.

Examinations tend to be multiple choice and 'correct' answers are derived from what is written in the syllabus. As a consequence, questions and answers in these exams can't take much account of context or the experience of the candidate. To many people, this implies the schemes and certificates awarded are practically useless. Because the syllabuses are so highly detailed, courses become a commodity, focused on exam passing. Competition in the training marketplace is based on cost and volumes rather than the quality of training.

Unless our industry provides the next step in provision of meaningful qualifications to accurately reflect experience and competence, those who recruit and manage testing staff will continue to depend on inadequate knowledge-based qualifications.

This session suggests that there is increasing demand for training and certification schemes that are based more on competence, rather than memory. What would such schemes look like? We've got some ideas, but we seek your input.

We'll provide a suggested framework that may help structure the measurement of competencies for different roles within testing and some ideas on how this measurement could take place. But wouldn't it be great to move this forward to a scheme that really benefits individuals and our industry?

Work with us in this session and maybe we can identify some of you who would like to get more deeply involved to take this to the next level.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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JAVA Conference (Course Ref: SS-35)

Dates: Mon 9th September 08
Venue: Cork, Radisson SAS Hotel, Little Island, Cork
Times: 9.00am – 5.30pm

Agenda

8.45am	Registration
9.00am	Welcome from Stephen Lawlor, it@cork, Technical Forum
9.05am	OSGI AND THE ENTERPRISE
	OSGI is one of the most talked about topic within Enterprise Java at the moment; major organisations are repositioning their development efforts to take advantage of OSGi. There is substantial mystery and strong claims regarding capability, methods for use and the benefits to the developer and the business. Ben will review the present state of the OSGi landscape providing a personal insight into both what OSGi can achieve and the issues that will be encountered trying to get there. SPEAKER: Ben Hale, SpringSource
10.30am	LUCENE - Open Source Search Engine - Case Study
	Main Points 1. Upgrading to the latest version of Lucene 2. Getting more relevant search results 3. Indexing different kinds of documents and containers 4. Searching by author 5. Boosting the title Field 6. Using Luke to trouble shoot the index 7. Adding auto complete of search terms using SPEAKER: Phil Corcoran, RR Donnelley
10.45am	Q & A
11.00am	COFFEE BREAK
11.15am	Eclipse Verticals - From Open Source Consumption to Creation
	Open Source Software is commonly understood as free and easy to access commodity. But we see an increasing trend in vertical industries such as banking, insurance and systems engineering to use the Open Source community paradigm to collaboratively develop, maintain and distribute software. In the talk, we want to use the Eclipse Open Source project as an example to describe how Open Source Foundations, licenses and governance models and an open architecture can support these groups and consortia. We will also give a brief overview over the development and IP processes that the Eclipse Foundation has put into place to make it easier for enterprises to capture the value provided by the Eclipse Open Source Project. SPEAKER: Ralph Mueller, Director, Eclipse Foundation
12.15pm	Leveraging Eclipse For Desktop Applications - Case Study
	While Eclipse is generally regarded as the leading IDE for Java developers, it can also be used as a platform for writing scalable, enterprise quailty applications. We will present the frameworks we have used from the Eclipse community to develop our desktop applications and show how Eclipse can be leveraged as sensible architectural choice for the future. SPEAKER: James Sugrue, Pilz Ireland
12.30pm	Q & A
12.45pm	Demo of Spring plugin tools for Eclipse SPEAKER: Jonas Partner, SpringSource
13.00pm	LUNCH
14.00pm	SPRING INTEGRATION - LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
	Spring Integration framework provides a simple model for creating message-driven systems by encapsulating the internal complexities of the systems. That way the business components of a system can be declaratively configured without knowledge of the integration infrastructure. Then Spring Integration delivers Inversion of Control principles to the run-time arena. SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson has said that “Spring Integration represents a key direction for Spring developers who are looking to build service-oriented, message-driven applications." SPEAKER: Jonas Partner, SpringSource
14.45pm	SOA IN PRACTICE
	Service-Orientated Architecture is an approach to developing complexdistributed software projects that can be of real help to businesseswith medium and large scale IT requirements as they try to reduceup-front costs of developing for growth. With a number number of real-world examples and case studies, this talk isintended to introduce SOA and to show that judicious application of its tenets brings real value to the process of developing systems. SPEAKER; Oisin Hurley, Iona Technologies
15.30pm	COFFEE
15.45pm	THE FUTURE OF JAVA for Rich Internet Applications
	Last year, Sun announced a new group of technologies called JavaFX. The idea behind this was to take the strengths of the Java platform as a robust, secure environment and deliver exciting new ways for developers to quickly and easily create and deploy visually appealiing internet applications. Since then a lot of work has been done culminating in the launch of the preview release of the JavaFX SDK at the end of July. This session will look at what JavaFX really is, the new compiler and tools available in the SDK and how to get started building applications. We'll also look at the forthcoming Java SE 6 update 10 release of the JDK and JRE which includes some exciting new developments for simplifying the deployment of the Java environment to large numbers of desktops. SPEAKER: Simon Ritter, Sun MicroSystems
17.00pm	Q & A

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Choosing the Best of the Plan-Driven and Agile Development Methods (Course Ref: SS-37)

Dates: Mon 15th September 08
Venue: Dublin, IBEC Offices, 84-86 Lr Baggot Street, Dublin 2
Times: 9.00am – 12.30pm
Fee: Free - please register with Ruth Walmsley at ruth.walmsley@momentumni.org

Speaker:

Lee Copeland

Lee Copeland has more than thirty-five years of experience as a consultant, instructor, author, and information systems professional. He has held a number of technical and managerial positions with commercial and non-profit organizations in the areas of applications development, software testing, and software development process improvement. Lee frequently speaks at software conferences both in the United States and internationally and currently serves as Program Chair for the Better Software Conference & Expo and the STAR testing conferences. Lee is the author of A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design, a compendium of the most effective methods of test case design.

Summary:

We seem to be under a curse in our profession. Although not cast by a witch or a wizard, the curse affects us just the same. It is the curse of “either/or”—the curse that we must choose either “this” or “that” but we cannot choose parts of both. Nowhere is this more evident than in today’s struggle between the adherents of the traditional “plan-driven” and newer “Agile” approaches to software development. What most overlook is that both groups want to achieve exactly the same goal: quality software that meets customer needs within the constraints of time, budget, staff, and technology. They differ only on the strategies to achieve this goal. For example, both groups agree that system requirements must be understood; their differences lie in questions of “how much of what to do and when to do it.” Lee Copeland offers insights and suggestions on the methods and approaches that will be most valued on your project—control vs. flexibility, individual contribution vs. process guidance, and contractual specification vs. adaptable delivery. Find out which of the plan-driven and Agile processes will work best in your organization and in your project’s context.

Testing Hyper-Complex Systems: What can we know? What can we claim?

Throughout history, humans have built systems of dramatically increasing complexity. In simpler systems, defects at the micro level are mitigated by the macro level structure. In complex systems, failures at the micro level cannot be compensated for at a higher level, often with catastrophic results. Now we are building hyper-complex computer systems, so complex that faults can create totally unpredictable behaviours. For example, systems based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model can be dynamically composed of reusable services of unknown quality, created by multiple organizations and communicating through many technologies across the unpredictable Internet. Lee Copeland explains that claims about quality require knowledge of test “coverage,” an unknowable quantity in hyper-complex systems. Are testers now going beyond our limits to provide useful information about the quality of systems to our clients? Join Lee for a look at your testing future as he describes new approaches needed to measure test coverage in these complex systems and lead your organization to better quality—despite the challenges.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Choosing the Best of the Plan-Driven and Agile Development Methods (Course Ref: SS-36)

Dates: Tue 16th September 08
Venue: Cork, Kingsley Hotel
Times: 9.00am – 12.30pm
Fee: Free - please register with Catherine Wall at admin@itcork.ie

Speaker:

Lee Copeland

Lee Copeland has more than thirty-five years of experience as a consultant, instructor, author, and information systems professional. He has held a number of technical and managerial positions with commercial and non-profit organizations in the areas of applications development, software testing, and software development process improvement. Lee frequently speaks at software conferences both in the United States and internationally and currently serves as Program Chair for the Better Software Conference & Expo and the STAR testing conferences. Lee is the author of A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design, a compendium of the most effective methods of test case design.

Summary:

We seem to be under a curse in our profession. Although not cast by a witch or a wizard, the curse affects us just the same. It is the curse of “either/or”—the curse that we must choose either “this” or “that” but we cannot choose parts of both. Nowhere is this more evident than in today’s struggle between the adherents of the traditional “plan-driven” and newer “Agile” approaches to software development. What most overlook is that both groups want to achieve exactly the same goal: quality software that meets customer needs within the constraints of time, budget, staff, and technology. They differ only on the strategies to achieve this goal. For example, both groups agree that system requirements must be understood; their differences lie in questions of “how much of what to do and when to do it.” Lee Copeland offers insights and suggestions on the methods and approaches that will be most valued on your project—control vs. flexibility, individual contribution vs. process guidance, and contractual specification vs. adaptable delivery. Find out which of the plan-driven and Agile processes will work best in your organization and in your project’s context.

Testing Hyper-Complex Systems: What can we know? What can we claim?

Throughout history, humans have built systems of dramatically increasing complexity. In simpler systems, defects at the micro level are mitigated by the macro level structure. In complex systems, failures at the micro level cannot be compensated for at a higher level, often with catastrophic results. Now we are building hyper-complex computer systems, so complex that faults can create totally unpredictable behaviours. For example, systems based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model can be dynamically composed of reusable services of unknown quality, created by multiple organizations and communicating through many technologies across the unpredictable Internet. Lee Copeland explains that claims about quality require knowledge of test “coverage,” an unknowable quantity in hyper-complex systems. Are testers now going beyond our limits to provide useful information about the quality of systems to our clients? Join Lee for a look at your testing future as he describes new approaches needed to measure test coverage in these complex systems and lead your organization to better quality—despite the challenges.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Testing Strategy & Test Metrics (Course Ref: SS-41)

Dates: Tue 4th – Wed 5th November 2008
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants:15

Overview

This workshop course is divided into two modules, test strategy and test metrics. Both focusing on test management techniques that will assist test teams in ensuring that test projects are completed in the most effective and efficient manner.

The course will provide students with the knowledge to not only plan and control their current project but also analyse the results of this project, with the aim of continual improvement in future projects.

Audience

QA/Test Managers, Test Leads, Senior Test Analysts, Project Managers, Development Managers

At Course Completion

After completing this course, students will be able to:

Determine the test project scope
Define an overall test strategy
Plan the testing types and levels required
Estimate Effort
Plan and schedule the test activities
Manage change within the project
Determine exit criteria
Signoff each phase and the final deliverable
Evaluate project performance
Evaluate product quality
Define process improvement goals

Strategy

Overview

Development Life Cycles
Test Types
Test Levels
Stages of Test Strategy Development

Defining the Scope

Deciding What Test Levels are Required

Determining the right Test Approach for each Level

Test Estimation

Risk Based Testing

Test Data and Environment Planning

Change Management

Setting Exit Criteria and Sign Off Process

Industry Standards and Templates

Test Management Tools

Metrics

Key Message

What is a Metric

What do Metrics give us

Basic Measurements

How Important are Metrics

Managing and Motivating Software Teams (Course Ref: SS-42)

SHEENA CLOHESSY CONSULTING

Dates: Wed 12th – Thu 13th November 2008
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants:12

Overview

This course is one of the most highly regarded courses delivered to Software Skillnet companies in 2006&7. It is aimed at Team Leaders who want to better understand themselves and are committed to becoming better at managing and motivating people.

This course is highly participative and inter-active using roles plays and practical exercises to develop your management behaviours and increase your ability to motivate your team. Participants will formulate a self development plan to apply the skills acquired to their workplace.

The course includes a psychometric questionnaire which MUST be completed prior to course commencement. A report on your leadership behaviour and style will be fully outlined to you during the course.

Course Objectives:

At the end of this course you should have the following: –

Raised self awareness of your own Management Style and how it impacts on other people. Understand why you behave the way you do. Identify your own motivators and how it impacts on your ability to motivate others.
Tools to enable you adapt and stretch your management ability to obtain results from people.
Insight that will help you predict your own behaviour and the behaviour of others.
How to handle relationships: clients and employees.
Insight into how your behaviour can cause conflict and de-motivation in your company.
Understand why personality clashes happen and how to resolve them.
Increased ability to influence people: customers and employees.
Motivating People: the ability to stretch your own management style to motivate people who are completely different from yourself.
Communication & influencing skills: how to communicate across all levels and to all kinds of people.

Testimonials

Managers, supervisors and team leaders in software companies who took part in the course in the past have said the following:

‘The personality and behavioural analysis using Comprehensive Personality Questionnaire (CPQ) and understanding how to "flex" leadership styles to reach different types of people. Very interesting. Very useful. Complimentary to Belbin’.

‘I really appreciated Sheena Clohessy’s openness in sharing her own personality profile with the group. I found this particularly helpful’.

‘I'm actively using the skills learnt in my day-to-day work. In particular, to improve my working relationship with a Director with whom I need to work closely and, up until now, with whom I've found extremely difficult to deal’.

‘I found the course extremely beneficial and inspiring at the same time. I suppose that the hard part is now implementing it on a day to day basis. The course has been very helpful in making me focus how I need to react to the different people in our group. These two days could not have come at a better time for me and now the ball is in my court to respond as I need to, so thanks again’.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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ScrumMaster & Agile Project Management Workshop (Course Ref: SS-43)

Dates: Thu 4th - Fri 5th December 2008
Venue: Dublin
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 12

Overview

In this practical, hands-on workshop you will learn how to apply agile and iterative methods, including Scrum – the most popular agile method worldwide to project management. Summarising key research and agile concepts, you will learn the core management practices required to succeed with agile methods.

This Agile PM workshop covers key concepts of agile methods and the roles, artefacts and events of Scrum. You will also learn how to estimate and plan your projects. Upon completion of this Agile Project Management course, you will have a solid grounding in the core agile values and principles that guide Agile practices.

Audience and Prerequisites

If you are a Project manager, Team Leads, IT/development manager, Product manager, Business analyst, Architects or developers interested in applying Scrum to maximise value creation, improve customer and employee satisfaction as well as engineering practices and tools.

Where agile comes from

Introduction

• Agile Values and Scrum Origins

• Scrum and Change

• Empirical Process Control

• Companies Using Scrum

Scrum Process and Roles

• Scrum Flow, Iterative-incremental Software Development and Shippable Product Increments

• The Role of the Product Owner

• The Role of the Team including Team Dynamics, Team Norms and the Visual Workplace

• The ScrumMaster Role including Conflict Management and Appraisals

• The Role of Project Managers and Functional Managers in Scrum

Requirements Management

• Software Overproduction

• The Product Backlog

• Prioritisation Techniques

Release Management

• Sustainable Pace

• Estimating and Planning

• Tracking

Working with Sprints

• Sprint Workflow and Characteristics

• Sprint Planning Preparation

• Sprint Estimating and Planning

• Daily Scrum

• Sprint Review and Retrospective

• Sprint Reporting

Large and Distributed Scrum Projects

• Brook’s Law

• Organic Growth and Conway’s Law

• Master Product Backlog and the Product Owner Team

• Team Set-up

• Multi-team Planning and Coordination

• Shared Norms and Assets

• Distributed Scrum Project Tips

• Sample Distributed Project Org

Getting Started in Scrum

• Just Do It

• The Nature of Change

• Scrum Adoption Stages

• Change Practices including the Enterprise Transition Team and the Transition Product Backlog

• Deming’s PDCA Cycle

• The Role of Consultants

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Oracle Tuning Workshop (Course Ref: SS-38)

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING WITH DAN HOTKA

Dates: Thurs 16th - Friday 17th October 2008
Venue: Cork, Professional Training, Building 4400, Cork Airport Business Park
Times: 9.00am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 10

Description

The focus of this tuning course is to illustrate coding techniques that insure a consistent response time between instances and releases of the Oracle database. This course works closely with performance tuning of actual SQL statements as well as covering a variety of Oracle Server tuning topics.

Pre-Requisites

A working knowledge of SQL. A knowledge of SQL Explain Plans is helpful but not necessary.

Topics covered:
• How Oracle arrives at an Execution Plan
• Index Review/Index Statistics/How Oracle Selects Indexes
• Advanced problem-solving topics using V$ Table information
• In-depth look at Explain Plans
• SQL Trace/Stats Pack
• PL/SQL Tuning/Profiling
• SQL Troubleshooting/problem solving

Attendees Receive:
• Study guide with presentations and relevant white papers
• Book: Oracle SQL Tuning Pocket Reference by Mark Gurry
• Diskette full of tuning and problem discovery scripts
• Opportunity to ask the tough Oracle questions
• A hands-on opportunity to learn more about Oracle, SQL Developer, Eagle Eye, and TOAD

Day 1: SQL Statement Tuning:
- Oracle RDBMS Architecture overview
- Understanding/Reading/Interpreting Explain Plans
- Understanding the Rule-based Optimizer
- Understanding the Cost-based Optimizer
- Working with Hints

Day 2: SQL Troubleshooting Tips and Techniques:
- Index Review/Tips & Techniques
- A close look at sub-query techniques
- Tuning Tool Review: Statspack, Events, Tracing/Tkprof
- Troubleshooting SQL
- Profiling and tuning PL/SQL

About Dan Hotka:
Dan Hotka is a Training Specialist who has over 29 years in the computer industry and over 24 years of experience with Oracle products. He is an internationally recognized Oracle expert with Oracle experience dating back to the Oracle V4.0 days. Dan’s latest book is the SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press. He is also the author of Oracle9i Development By Example and Oracle8i from Scratch by Que and has co-authored 7 other popular books including the Database Oracle10g Linux Administration by Oracle Press. He is frequently published in Oracle trade journals, and regularly speaks at Oracle conferences and user groups around the world.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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ISEB Intermediate (Course Ref: SS-44)

Dates: Tuesday 25th - 27th November 2008
Venue: Cork, to be confirmed
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 12

Overview

This course prepares participants to sit the one-hour, closed book examination leading to the Intermediate certificate in Software Testing, offered by the Information Systems Examinations Board (ISEB).

The intermediate certificate provides a valuable qualification for those building a career in testing. It is delivered in a 3 day format followed by a 1 hour examination.

This course is intended for software testing professionals that hold the ISEB Foundation Certificate in Software Testing. A pass in this certificate provides evidence that the candidate has proven analytical ability, having gained knowledge and practical skills in the key topics required for practicing software testing.

This qualification examines up to level K4 of the given learning objectives / levels of knowledge. The intention is that you will be able to provide this valuable skill internally in your own projects or externally to a variety of clients.

This certificate is a pre-requisite for sitting either the ISEB Practitioner in Test Management or Test Analysis examinations.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Test Automation for Testers (Course Ref: SS-40)

INSIGHT

Dates: Mon 24th - Tue 25th November 2008
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants:12

Course Overview

Even when well used, functional test automation tools can fail to deliver to their full potential because the skills involved in building a powerful automated test solution usually involve a much broader technical knowledge base than that claimed by the tool vendors.

This course introduces techniques and practices not generally covered by the official tool courses which will significantly improve the return on investment of functional test automation, increase the work efficiency of automation engineers, or give test shelfware a second chance.

The course includes computer based lab exercises with a typical test tool.

Audience

The course is of benefit to anyone who will be exposed to building functional test automation.

Test Automation Engineers
Testers

Types of testing covered

Regression testing
Functional testing of the user interface
Functional testing of application components

Pre-requisites

This course requires previous system test work experience

Previous experience of a test automation tool is recommended.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of the course, you will be able to

Work more efficiently with relevant skills
Apply test script design best practices
Formulate a detailed functional test automation plan
Choose the optimum script architecture for your test project
Apply software engineering best practices
Understand how user interfaces are built
Understand how test automation tools work internally
Leverage powerful features in your test tool
Write scripts that access any type of data source
Avoid simple script recording mistakes
Extend test tools to use features provided by the operating system, free utilities, and open source tools.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Test Automation for Managers (Course Ref: SS-39)

INSIGHT

Dates: This course has been cancelled
Venue: Dublin, Grand Canal Hotel
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Max. number of participants: 16

Course Overview

Software Test Automation can bring significant benefits to organizations, including; improved quality, improved metrics, reduced test cycles, reduced costs and better utilization of skilled S/W test and QA personnel. However many automation projects fail. This course is designed to provide S/W Test and QA managers and senior professionals with the knowledge to select the most appropriate automation strategy to their situation and to prepare an execution plan that will deliver the target results.

Course Objectives

Participants will learn how to identify is there a business case for automation in their organization, select and manage automation project, select and manage the correct automation technologies whether they be proprietary or freely available tools and/or scripting languages. Participants will also learn about the range of tools that can be deployed across the full development life cycle, including; static test tools, such as code checkers and dynamic test tools, that can be used to automate both functional and non functional (e.g. Performance, Load and Stress) tests. Test Management Tools will also be reviewed as they provide a useful way of managing the overall test process.

Level and Orientation of Audience

The intended audience includes test managers, development managers, and anyone who will have to make a decision about using automation in their development lifecycle. Attendees are expected to have some knowledge of the software development lifecycle and understand basis concepts of testing.

Learning Objectives

You can expect to learn.

• What automation will do for you organization

• Thinking of automation in the broader sense. The different tools that are available and where they are used in the development lifecycle

• The business case

• How to select a tool

• How to select and manage a project

• Settings expectations

• Pit falls

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Evolution of Testing Strategies for verification of new features (Course Ref: SS-45)

Dates: Thu 6th November 2008
Venue: Dublin, IBEC, Confederation House, 84-86 Lr Baggot Street, Dublin 2
Times: 5.30pm – 8.00pm
Fee: This event is free. To attend you must register with anna.donegan@ibec.ie
Please note that this event will be followed by the SoftTest AGM.

Speaker - Michael Monaghan, LM Ericsson (Ireland)

Michael has worked for over 14 years in the field of Development, Verification and Deployment of 2nd and 3rd generation Cellular Radio Access Networks. This work has included development and/or verification of several flagship features in GSM and WCDMA technologies, among them GPRS/Edge and HSPA, which allow very fast data throughput on cellular networks. Michael has worked in all parts of the produce life-cycle, from requirements definition to troubleshooting on operator networks. He has used this knowledge to continuously drive new and innovative ways to improve verification efficiency, thus helping to improve time to market for key cellular features.

Summary

Since the commercial launch of 3G Radio Access Networks in the early part of this decade, the market has been demanding new and more complex features, with ever decreasing time to market requirements. This, combined with demands for continuous improvements in operational excellence necessitate more efficient development practices. In order to maximise these efficiencies, it is vital that improvements are also made in verification strategies.

This presentation will provide a whistle-stop tour along a timeline covering the last several years. The tour will detail the challenges encountered by New Feature Verification in LM Ericsson, how some changes to development methodology were used to help secure more verification efficiencies and how verification organisations across LM Ericsson worked together to gain considerable savings in cost and lead time.

To attend this presentation please register with mailto:anna.donegan@ibec.ie

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SoftTest Seminar (Course Ref: SS-46)

Dates: Thu 4th December 2008
Venue: Dublin, IBEC, Confederation House, 84-86 Lr Baggot Street, Dublin 2
Times: 9.30am - 12.30pm
Fee: FREE - please register with anna.donegan@ibec.ie

Speaker -

Stuart Reidis Chief Technology Officer at Testing Solutions Group and has a PhD in Software Testing. He is Convenor of ISO WG26, which is developing the new ISO 29119 Software Testing Standard and represents software testing on the BSI Software Engineering Committee. He is also Chair of the BCS Specialist Group in Software Testing (SIGiST) and its Standards Working Party, was previously Chair of the ISEB Software Testing Board and founded the ISTQB. He is a regular presenter at international testing conferences and events and was awarded the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award in 2001.

Summary

In May 2007 ISO formed a working group to develop a new standard on software testing a new area for ISO. This initiative is closely-supported by IEEE and BSI, both of which are providing existing standards as source documents to the project.
The proposed standard, ISO 29119, comprises four parts. The first covers "concepts and terminology", the second "test process", the third "test documentation", and the fourth "test techniques". This presentation describes progress on the development of ISO 29119 and the challenges with creating a generic testing standard that is applicable to all organizations and all types of project. It will cover how you can use it, and explains how you can contribute to its development through your national standards body.

Speaker -

Paul Gerrard is the founder and Principal of Gerrard Consulting, a services company focused on increasing the success rate of IT-based projects for clients. He has conducted assignments in all aspects of Software Testing and Quality Assurance. He has degrees from the Universities of Oxford and London, was on the BCS SIGIST committee for 13 years, Founding Chair of the ISEB Tester Qualification Board and the host/organiser of the quarterly UK Test Management Forum and annual Summit conferences. He is a regular speaker at seminars and conferences in the UK, continental Europe and the USA. Paul has written many papers and articles, most of which are on the gerrardconsulting.com website. With Neil Thompson, Paul wrote 'Risk-Based E-Business Testing' - the standard text for risk-based testing. Paul is currently researching Test Axioms as a basis for test approaches, Critical Thinking and Open Source testing and collaboration tools. In 2008, Paul set up a new company, Aqastra with Susan Windsor. The aim of Aqastra is to provide an assessment, retraining and mentoring service to organisations wishing to transform business users into testers.

Summary

Paul will host a facilitated session on "The Future of Testing - Some Predictions". How arrogant is it to say, I am predicting the future. Of course, these are not predictions I'd bet my house on. These reflect some thoughts on what could affect you or your organization in the future. In this respect, these are simply some things that are worth considering and keeping an eye on for the next year or two. For every prediction, I know you probably know of an exception. During this Paul will discuss his views on a selection of topics such as, the testing community, people skills and the job market and even THE EFFECT OF THE CREDIT CRUNCH!!!!!

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Certified ScrumMaster Training (Course Ref SS50)

Date: 13-14 January 2009
Venue: Bewleys Hotel, Dublin

Overview
Leading a Scrum team is radically different to traditional project management. Rather than plan, instruct, and direct, the leader of a Scrum team (called a ScrumMaster) facilitates, coaches, and leads. In this ScrumMaster Certification course, you will learn the essentials of working as a ScrumMaster or Scrum team member. You will learn how to assume the responsibilities of a ScrumMaster and to guide the development team, a project, or an organisation into Agile practice by fostering the adoption of new attitudes, collaborative processes and working to remove institutional barriers.

While the Scrum Alliance provides a list of core concepts that must be covered in the class, each instructor creates his or her own material, allowing courses to differ based on the strengths, interests, and experiences of the instructor. Martine's interest, research and experience has focused on planning and estimation techniques and as such this ScrumMaster Certification course covers Agile Estimation and Planning techniques in particular depth.

Upon completion of this ScrumMaster course, you will know how to use Scrum to maximise value creation, improve customer and employee satisfaction as well as engineering practices and tools. Additionally, upon successful completion of the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year Scrum Alliance membership, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information is available..

Objectives

Assume the responsibilities of a ScrumMaster
Remove the barriers between development and the customer so that the customer/Product Owner directly drives development
Improve employee and customer satisfaction
Improve accuracy of estimation and planning
Improve the engineering practices and tools so each increment of functionality is potentially shippable

Format

The course blends tutorial, class discussion, question and answer sessions, and demonstrations/simulations.

Introduction

Agile Values and Scrum Origins
Scrum and Change
Empirical Process Control
Companies Using Scrum

Scrum Process and Roles

Scrum Flow, Iterative-incremental Software Development and Shippable Product Increments
The Role of the Product Owner
The Role of the Team including Team Dynamics, Team Norms and the Visual Workplace
The ScrumMaster Role including Conflict Management, Appraisals and Appointing the ScrumMaster
The Role of Project Managers and Functional Managers in Scrum

Requirements Management

Software Overproduction
The Product Backlog
Prioritisation Techniques

Release Management

Sustainable Pace
Estimating and Planning
Tracking

Working with Sprints

Sprint Workflow and Characteristics
Sprint Planning Preparation
Sprint Estimating and Planning
Daily Scrum
Sprint Review and Retrospective
Sprint Reporting

Large and Distributed Scrum Projects

Brook’s Law
Organic Growth and Conway’s Law
Master Product Backlog and the Product Owner Team
Team Set-up
Multi-team Planning and Coordination
Shared Norms and Assets
Distributed Scrum Project Tips
Sample Distributed Project Org

Getting Started in Scrum

Just Do It
The Nature of Change
Scrum Adoption Stages
Change Practices including the Enterprise Transition Team and the Transition Product Backlog
Deming’s PDCA Cycle
The Role of Consultants

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Oracle SQL Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques (Course Ref SS51)

Date: 25-27 February 2009
Venue: Professional Training Premises, 4400 Cork Airport Business Park, Cork
Times: 9.30am - 5.00pm

Give your technical staff that competitive edge with this local Oracle Workshop

All course fees include the provision of new, fully comprehensive course manuals.

The focus of this tuning course is to illustrate coding techniques that insure a consistent response time between instances and releases of the Oracle database. This course works closely with performance tuning of actual SQL statements as well as covering a variety of Oracle Server tuning topics.

The course starts out with a complete overview of the Oracle architecture so students can get an understanding how their SQL and applications can take advantage of the computing environment. This course includes a discussion on the differences of the various Explain Plan steps such as Merge-Join and Nested-Loop, and when is it best to use each. Dan goes into considerable detail, with SQL examples, on how the optimizers (both rule and cost) make their decisions. Students will work with a variety of SQL statements, reviewing explain plans and making changes to make these SQL statements perform better. Students will also experience how to monitor their application environment, their indexes, and see how to find problem SQL in their applications.

The focus this course is tuning SQL via coding style. The instructor finds that tuning in this fashion maintains the performance of the SQL when migrating to other Oracle environments (upgrades to newer releases). Students will also experience how to monitor their application environment, their indexes, and see how to find problem SQL in their applications using Stats Pack and the V$ dictionary tables.

Advanced topics focuses on a variety of parameter settings that make a big difference to Oracle-based applications (such as OPTIMIZER_INDEX_CACHING & INDEX_COST_ADJUSTMENT). This workshop includes a section on monitoring Oracle RDBMS and SQL via the v$ tables and TOAD. This course is packed full of scripts to discover a variety of issues.

This course is perfect for developers who need to know more on how Oracle works and how to get their SQL to perform better. This course is also good for those who are light on SQL tuning or perhaps are new to the Oracle RDBMS.

The course utilizes a variety of current tools. Students will have the opportunity to learn more about TOAD, SQL Developer, TextPAD, as well as the Oracle tools like SQL*Plus, TKProf, and Stats Pack.

Workshop Prerequisites:

A working knowledge of the SQL language. Knowledge of SQL Explain Plans is helpful but not necessary.

Topics covered:

How Oracle arrives at an Execution Plan
Index Review/Index Statistics/How Oracle Selects Indexes
Advanced problem-solving topics using V$ Table information
In-depth look at Explain Plans
SQL Trace/Stats Pack
PL/SQL Tuning/Profiling
SQL Troubleshooting/problem solving

Lectures and topics are enhanced with live illustrations and hands-on exercises

Attendees Receive:

Study guide with presentations and relevant white papers
Book: Oracle SQL Tuning Pocket Reference by Mark Gurry
Diskette full of tuning and problem discovery scripts
Opportunity to ask the tough Oracle questions
A hands-on opportunity to learn more about Oracle, SQL Developer, Eagle Eye, and TOAD

Course Outline:

Day 1: SQL Statement Tuning
- Oracle RDBMS Architecture overview
- Understanding/Reading/Interpreting Explain Plans
- Understanding the Rule-based Optimizer
- Understanding the Cost-based Optimizer
- Working with Hints
Day 2: SQL Troubleshooting Tips and Techniques
- Index Review/Tips & Techniques
- A close look at sub-query coding techniques
- Tuning Tool Review: Statspack, Events, Tracing/Tkprof
- Using the SQL Tuning Advisor
- Profiling and tuning PL/SQL
Optional Day 3: SQL Troubleshooting Tips and Techniques (Advanced Topics)
- Oracle Internals: How Oracle writes
- Various Space Management Issues discussed
- Monitoring Sorting
- Finding Problem SQL using v$ information
- Monitoring SQL using V$LongOps
- Tuning the network/Tuning the client
- Troubleshooting SQL
- Tuning by Object Placement

About Dan Hotka:

Dan Hotka is a Training Specialist who has over 30 years in the computer industry and over 25 years of experience with Oracle products. He is an internationally recognized Oracle expert with Oracle experience dating back to the Oracle V4.0 days. Dan’s latest book is the SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press. He is also the author of Oracle9i Development By Example and Oracle8i from Scratch by Que and has co-authored 7 other popular books including the Database Oracle10g Linux Administration by Oracle Press. He is frequently published in Oracle trade journals, and regularly speaks at Oracle conferences and user groups around the world. Visit his website at www.DanHotka.com. Dan can be reached at dhotka@earthlink.net .

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Oracle SQL Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques (Course Ref SS52)

Date: 2-3 March 2009
Venue: This course has been relocated to Cork - Venue to be confirmed
Times: 9.30am - 5.00pm

Give your technical staff that competitive edge with this Oracle Masterclass delivered by a global expert - Dan Hotka.

All course fees include the provision of new, fully comprehensive course manuals recently developed by Dan and available to participants on his programmes only.

The focus of this tuning Masterclass is to illustrate coding techniques that insure a consistent response time between instances and releases of the Oracle database. This course works closely with performance tuning of actual SQL statements as well as covering a variety of Oracle Server tuning topics.

The course starts out with a complete overview of the Oracle architecture so students can get an understanding how their SQL and applications can take advantage of the computing environment. This course includes a discussion on the differences of the various Explain Plan steps such as Merge-Join and Nested-Loop, and when is it best to use each. Dan goes into considerable detail, with SQL examples, on how the optimizers (both rule and cost) make their decisions. Students will work with a variety of SQL statements, reviewing explain plans and making changes to make these SQL statements perform better. Students will also experience how to monitor their application environment, their indexes, and see how to find problem SQL in their applications.

The focus this course is tuning SQL via coding style. The instructor finds that tuning in this fashion maintains the performance of the SQL when migrating to other Oracle environments (upgrades to newer releases). Students will also experience how to monitor their application environment, their indexes, and see how to find problem SQL in their applications using Stats Pack and the V$ dictionary tables.

Workshop Prerequisites:
A working knowledge of the SQL language. Knowledge of SQL Explain Plans is helpful but not necessary.,/p>

Topics covered:

How Oracle arrives at an Execution Plan
Index Review/Index Statistics/How Oracle Selects Indexes
Advanced problem-solving topics using V$ Table information
In-depth look at Explain Plans
SQL Trace/Stats Pack
PL/SQL Tuning/Profiling
SQL Troubleshooting/problem solving

Lectures and topics are enhanced with live illustrations and hands-on exercises

Attendees Receive:

Study guide with presentations and relevant white papers
Book: Oracle SQL Tuning Pocket Reference by Mark Gurry
Diskette full of tuning and problem discovery scripts
Opportunity to ask the tough Oracle questions
A hands-on opportunity to learn more about Oracle, SQL Developer, Eagle Eye, and TOAD

Course Outline:

Day 1: SQL Statement Tuning
- Oracle RDBMS Architecture overview
- Understanding/Reading/Interpreting Explain Plans
- Understanding the Rule-based Optimizer
- Understanding the Cost-based Optimizer
- Working with Hints
Day 2: SQL Troubleshooting Tips and Techniques
- Index Review/Tips & Techniques
- A close look at sub-query coding techniques
- Tuning Tool Review: Statspack, Events, Tracing/Tkprof
- Using the SQL Tuning Advisor
- Profiling and tuning PL/SQL

About Dan Hotka:

Dan Hotka is a Training Specialist who has over 30 years in the computer industry and over 25 years of experience with Oracle products. He is an internationally recognized Oracle expert with Oracle experience dating back to the Oracle V4.0 days. Dan’s latest book is the SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press. He is also the author of Oracle9i Development By Example and Oracle8i from Scratch by Que and has co-authored 7 other popular books including the Database Oracle10g Linux Administration by Oracle Press. He is frequently published in Oracle trade journals, and regularly speaks at Oracle conferences and user groups around the world. Visit his website at www.DanHotka.com. Dan can be reached at dhotka@earthlink.net .

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Business Analysis (Course Ref: SS-53)

Dates: Wed 11th - Thurs 12th March 2009
Venue: Hilton Hotel, Dublin
Times: 9.30am - 5.00pm

Business Analysis is a critical process that drives the project life cycle. The Business Analyst, acting as an intermediary between the business and technical communities, analyses competing business needs and develops plans to implement the projects that support stakeholder objectives.

In this course, you gain foundational knowledge of the role and function of the business analyst.

What skills will the delegate gain?
This course will enable delegates to:

Understand the BA's role and responsibilities
Understand the importance of scope
Work with business users to gather and document high-level and detailed requirements
Work with business users and delivery teams to develop optimal solutions to agreed requirements
Plan and manage analysis activity including quality and sign-off reviews
Assess and manage change requests
Confidently present findings to their peer group and project team

For a full and detailed course outlines please click here.

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VOIP Fundamentals (Course Ref: SS-54)

Dates: Wed 1st and Thu 2nd April 2009
Venue: Accuris Networks, D'Olier Street, Dublin 2
Times: 9.30am - 5.00pm

The current hot topic in recent years has been the convergence of voice and data. This course investigates the characteristics of voice transmission and then studies the impact on IP networks.

Who will benefit?
Anyone working in the field of networking or telecommunications.

VoIP training course prerequisites
Intro to data communications & networking.
TCP/IP fundamentals.

VoIP training course objectives
By the end of the course delegates will be able to:

Describe the issues of voice and data convergence.
Describe techniques, which can be used in IP to provide low uniform delay.
Evaluate VOIP technologies.
Design data networks, which will support voice.

To see the full course content, please click here.

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Programming with GUT's in Test-Driven (Course Ref: SS-55)

Dates: Mon 23rd February 2009
Venue: Hilton Hotel, Dublin
Times: 9.30am – 12.30pm
Fee: Free to Software Skillnet members - please register with Susan Kelly at susan@isa-skillnet.com

This is the first in our new 3T Seminars on Emerging Trends, Technologies and Topics for Software companies. It is aimed software developer's, architect's, test engineer's or technical leads, keen to learn more effective programmer testing.

These days, testing is considered sexy for programmers. Who'd have thought it? But there is a lot more to effective programmer testing than the fashionable adoption of a unit-testing framework: effective unit testing involves (a lot) more than knowledge of assertion syntax.

Testing represents a form of communication and, as such, it offers multiple levels and forms of feedback, not just basic defect detection. Effective unit testing requires an understanding of what forms of feedback and communication are offered by tests, and what styles encourage or discourage such qualities.

Unit testing can highlight coupling problems, functional defects, problematic programming practices, awkward programmatic interfaces, overly procedural objects, overly object-like procedures, unclear requirements, poor integration culture, and development process problems and so on.

Not everyone, however, appreciates that problems with unit testing tend to be a consequence of these deeper problems, and so they aim to fix or criticise symptoms rather than root causes, thereby missing a valuable opportunity for improvement and learning. In short, programmer testing is as much a design activity and an exploration of requirements as it is a way of finding defects.

While there is certainly more to testing than unit testing, and more to a well-rounded approach to development than just testing, a failure to appreciate the role and practice of unit testing can lead to disappointment or a skewed notion of testing as a programmer's responsibility.

This Seminar aims to look at some issues, examples and counterexamples that help to highlight some of the problems and offer some solutions.

About the speaker:

Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant and trainer. He specialises in programming languages and techniques, OO design, patterns, agile development and software architecture. He is a popular speaker at conferences in Europe and North America.

Kevlin is a columnist for various magazines and online publications, including The Register, Better Software, Java Report and C++ Report. With Frank Buschmann and Doug Schmidt, he is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series.

He has variously developed and delivered training courses, consultancy and software across a number of domains ever since getting involved in professional software development in the late 1980s. His work focuses on software architecture and patterns, programming languages and techniques, and agile development and programmer testing practices.

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Presentation Skills for Software Professionals(Course Ref: SS-56)

Dates: Tues 31st March & Wed 1st April
Venue: Ballsbridge Court (Formerly Berkeley Court), Dublin
Times: 9.30am - 5.00pm

This workshop provides techniques, which will enhance the quality and effectiveness of presentation sessions given by Software Professionals in a role of “Product and Technical experts”. The workshop will benefit those whose role is to explain or train others in the use of technical products, software applications or end-user services.

The main techniques and content of this course are presented in an interactive presentation style, but being workshop based these sessions ensures full participation by all attendees (max 10). Each attendee is required to deliver two presentations – the duration of each to be decided based on product delivery emphasis.

Accurate feedback is vital; hence the group in open forum discusses each presentation, immediately after the presentation thereby critiquing strengths and highlighting areas for improvement. This also forms a valuable part of a Personal Action Plan to apply on return to the real workplace.

Objectives

Although everyone develops their own style in delivering technical information, there are specific techniques, which can be very effective when properly applied. This course takes a fresh look at those techniques and provides a set of interactive ‘people skills’ approaches, which can ensure high quality, enjoyable yet focused sessions.

Although actual ‘Presentation Technique’ is important, this course provides higher-level communication methods, which lead to enhanced audience awareness, better interpersonal contact and a highly interactive, participative presentation style.

Content

Objectives, Presentation Styles

Specifying Outcomes (assessing need, deliver to impress, applying/highlighting solutions)
Objectives and focus of ‘Product Delivery’
Personal Confidence Preparation: Structure; Content; Flow; Timings

Standard Presentation Techniques

Typical problems with “Technical Experts”
Preparing for presentation - what content? - What delivery method?
Verbal/non-verbal communication
How to make things visual - The strongest retention force
Tools of the trade - Visual Aids (Flipcharts/Whiteboards, Data Projector etc)
Dealing (productively) with stage fright

Interactive Presentation Style

“Learner-centred” presentations
Reading (and reacting to) the audience’s non-verbal feedback
Encouraging questions and participation
Dealing with questions from the audience
Posing questions - stimulating your audience
Managing an interactive environment

Openings & Closings

The presentation Introduction; Roles and Specific objectives
Creating the right environment
Techniques for closing: Topic; Presentation; Benefits

Preparation Techniques

Planning your time
Planning your materials
Planning Workshops and Demos
Planning the Course timeline
Personal Action Plan - Plan to SUCCEED

The Presenter/Trainer Role(s)

Use of FIVE PRESENTER ROLES, which can transform your presentations!
Role as an interactive technique
Understanding ‘Learning Preferences’: Mumford & Jung; 4MAT

Dealing with Awkward Attendees

Preventive and Assertive Techniques - Staying in Command
Classic techniques to control interest - How far you can go

Team Presentations

Working in teams of two, prepare (one hour is allocated for prep) to deliver a 20-30 minute hands-on learning session designed to teach the group some selected, relevant aspects of a Software Application.

Each Team has to complete the following tasks:

1. Specify the presentation content (Goals, timeline, delivery)

2. Prepare the presentation information as a PowerPoint session

3. Incorporate hands-on elements in the learning process

4. Decide which Team member will handle which part

5. Deliver a 20-30 minute session as a Team

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ISTQB Advanced Test Analyst (Course Ref: SS-58)

Dates: Mon 23rd - Fri 27th March (Exam to take place Fri 3rd April)
Venue: Mount Herbert Hotel, Dublin
Times: 9.30am - 5.00pm

Course Overview:

Following on from the ISTQB Foundation Certificate, the Advanced Test Analyst Certificate provides the next level of knowledge and practical expertise in the ISTQB Advanced Certification scheme. It is one of three certified courses at Advanced level (the other two being Advanced Test Manager and Advanced Technical Test Analyst).

The 5 day tutor led course has been designed to enable participants understand, apply and analyse key testing principles and processes.

Who should attend?

This course is aimed at testing practitioners already working in the area of test design, analysis, specification and implementation. This includes quality analysts, testers, developers, systems analysts, project leaders, users and data administrators.

Successful completion of the ISTQB Foundation Certificate is a pre-requisite to taking the ISTQB Advanced Certificate examination.

What will you learn?

Structure the tasks defined in the test strategy in terms of business domain requirements
Analyze the system in sufficient detail to meet the user quality expectations
Evaluate the system requirements to determine domain validity
Prepare and execute the adequate testing activities, and report on their progress
Provide the necessary evidence to support evaluations
Implement the necessary tools and techniques to achieve the defined goals

Course Contents an overview

1. Introduction to Test Analyst Syllabus

2. Basic Aspects of Software Testing

3. Testing Processes

- Test Analysis & Evaluation

- Test Implementation & Execution

- Evaluation of Exit Criteria and Reporting

4. Test Management

5. Risk Based Testing

6. Test Techniques

7. Specification based

8. Defect & Experience based

9. Test of Software Characteristics

10. Quality Attributes for Domain Testing

11. Quality Attributes for Technical Testing

12. Reviews

13. Incident Management

14. Test Tools & Automation

15. Test Tool Concepts

16. Test Tool Categories

17. People Skill Team Composition

18. Communication

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Certified ScrumMaster Training (Course Ref: SS-57)

Dates: Tue 3rd - Wed 4th March
Venue: Cork International Airport Hotel
Times: 9.00am - 5.00pm

For full overview please click here

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Programming with GUT's in Test-Driven (Course Ref: SS-59)

Dates: Fri 3rd April 2009
Venue: tba, Cork
Times: 9.30am – 12.30pm

This is the first in our new 3T Seminars on Emerging Trends, Technologies and Topics for Software companies. It is aimed software developer's, architect's, test engineer's or technical leads, keen to learn more effective programmer testing.

These days, testing is considered sexy for programmers. Who'd have thought it? But there is a lot more to effective programmer testing than the fashionable adoption of a unit-testing framework: effective unit testing involves (a lot) more than knowledge of assertion syntax.

Testing represents a form of communication and, as such, it offers multiple levels and forms of feedback, not just basic defect detection. Effective unit testing requires an understanding of what forms of feedback and communication are offered by tests, and what styles encourage or discourage such qualities.

Unit testing can highlight coupling problems, functional defects, problematic programming practices, awkward programmatic interfaces, overly procedural objects, overly object-like procedures, unclear requirements, poor integration culture, and development process problems and so on.

Not everyone, however, appreciates that problems with unit testing tend to be a consequence of these deeper problems, and so they aim to fix or criticise symptoms rather than root causes, thereby missing a valuable opportunity for improvement and learning. In short, programmer testing is as much a design activity and an exploration of requirements as it is a way of finding defects.

While there is certainly more to testing than unit testing, and more to a well-rounded approach to development than just testing, a failure to appreciate the role and practice of unit testing can lead to disappointment or a skewed notion of testing as a programmer's responsibility.

This Seminar aims to look at some issues, examples and counterexamples that help to highlight some of the problems and offer some solutions.

About the speaker:

Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant and trainer. He specialises in programming languages and techniques, OO design, patterns, agile development and software architecture. He is a popular speaker at conferences in Europe and North America.

Kevlin is a columnist for various magazines and online publications, including The Register, Better Software, Java Report and C++ Report. With Frank Buschmann and Doug Schmidt, he is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series.

He has variously developed and delivered training courses, consultancy and software across a number of domains ever since getting involved in professional software development in the late 1980s. His work focuses on software architecture and patterns, programming languages and techniques, and agile development and programmer testing practices.

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Software Testing Event(Course Ref: SS-60)

Dates: Wed 27th May 2009
Venue: Holiday Inn, Pearse Street, Dublin
Times: 4.30pm – 7.00pm
Fee: Free to Software Skillnet members - please register with Alicia Hunt at alicia.hunt@ibec.ie

Professionalism in Testing - Abstract

Often the test the professional finds him or her self working in or with organisations they perceive to be less professional than themselves. For many this scenario can be frustrating because they may not have the experience to have a positive influence and raise professional standards. Perhaps it’s just a single individual or group that poses the perceived challenge. This talk looks at how we recognise and classify the situation and what strategies and actions us as individuals or as a test team can take to raise the total performance standard of professional behaviours and results.

The Premise

There are a number of propositions that the presenter would like to put to the profession:

Our understanding of the professionalism of those around us is sometimes more a matter of perception than fact and often a mix.
Professional behaviours of individuals, teams and organisations are often caused by the business environment and situation they operate in.
Professional development is primarily the responsibility of the individual or group; it can be accelerated by the professionalism and support of the organisations they work in or with.
Each Test Professional can influence group professional performance.

Speaker Profile - John Mc Ardle

John is Director of the Applications Software Group within Sogeti Ireland and was formerly Consulting Director of Insight Test Services, a provider of Strategic Consulting, Training and Managed Test Services to software organisations. John has been involved in the software products and services industry for the past twenty years across a range of sectors including travel, banking, telecommunications and utilities. During that period he has worked on many large scale software development, testing and IT change management programmes for both in-house and external clients. He has significant experience of implementing software quality management systems and tools, vendor evaluation and selection and outsourcing.

Software Testing in the world of Start Ups - Abstract...

This presentation offers a glimpse into software testing in the world of startups. It looks at the constraints and benefits facing software testers in this unique environment. It examines what it takes to be a software tester in a startup.

It will also be a bit of a myth buster session, looking at some of the myths around testing in startups. It closes by asking are we as a software testing industry doing enough to help startups improve their software.

Speaker Profile - Anne Marie Charrett

Anne-Marie Charrett is a professional software tester and runs her own company Testing Times. An electronic engineer by trade, software testing chose her, when in 1990 she started conformance testing against European standards. She was hooked and has been testing since then. Anne-Marie really enjoys working with innovative and creative people, which has led her to specialise working for startup and incubators.

Anne-Marie is a keen blogger and hosts her own blog http://mavericktester.com/.

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Software Testing Event(Course Ref: SS-61)

Dates: Wed 17th June 2009
Venue: Holiday Inn, Pearse Street, Dublin
Times: 12.30pm – 2.00pm
Fee: Free to Software Skillnet members - please register with Anna Donegan at anna.donegan@ibec.ie

Evolution of new feature verification in Ericsson & Software Testing and Global Industry

To read the full outlines for the above topics, please click here.

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Clarke Ching - Everyday Agile (Course Ref: SS-62)

Dates: Mon 27th July 2009
Venue: IBEC Offices, Dublin
Times: 9.30am - 12.30pm
Fee: Free to Software Skillnet members - please register with Alicia Hunt at alicia.hunt@ibec.ie

Everyday Agile for profit, happiness and competitive advantage.

Imagine you had a tool that was guaranteed to make your business loads more money, to delight your customers, and, even, to make your workplace happier. Great! You investigate and discover that there are a few downsides: the tool looks scary and intimidating and probably incompatible with your current tool-set; it comes with a 200 page instruction manual which was surely written by someone who reads a lot of comic books in their spare time and only speaks English as a 2nd language; and - you've been told - it can only be operated by super-intelligent people with poor social skills. You do more research and discover that the tool has been widely adopted by the "early adopters" - the gadget freaks, as you think of them - but it's struggled whenever everyday people try to use it; you're also put off by it's EXTREME sounding name. Understandably, you abandon the tool ... and the benefits that come with it. In this session, long-time Lean and Agile practitioner, and Theory of Constraints expert, Clarke Ching demonstrates, first, the businesses benefits of working in an "Agile" way, then how to adopt Agile in a focused and incremental, rather than extreme, way. This is "Agile" for everyday people, not rocket scientists. It's the sticky, commercially viable version of Agile. Attendees may find it useful to read Clarke's free business parable - www.rocksintogold.com - before attending the session. It explains many of the business benefits of Agile without mentioning the word Agile.

Clarke Ching Bio

My name is Clarke Ching. I teach - and do - a very simple version of Agile - one that works well for people who haven't read too many books on Agile, who really don't want to be "extreme" about anything, and who, maybe, use COBOL, or Java, or .net, or maybe don't even develop software at all. I call it everyday Agile because it's designed to bring the benefits of agile - more projects finished, happier customers, happier developers, and so on - to everyday people who work in everyday businesses. It's the 80/20 version of Agile where you get 80% of the benefits, with only 20% of the effort. Oh, and because it's easy to adopt, it tends to work and stay working. If you are familiar with Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (as used by manufacturers like Boeing, Intel and Ford) then Everyday Agile is simply TOC applied to software development. If you're not familiar with TOC then think of Lean as Toyota do it (rather than how it's described in the books) instead.

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Certified ScrumMaster Training (Course Ref SS65)

Date: 24-25 September 2009
Venue: Dublin Grand Canal Hotel.
Times: 9.30am - 5.00pm
Fee: €600 for members €1300 for non-members

Overview
Leading a Scrum team is radically different to traditional project management. Rather than plan, instruct, and direct, the leader of a Scrum team (called a ScrumMaster) facilitates, coaches, and leads. In this ScrumMaster Certification course, you will learn the essentials of working as a ScrumMaster or Scrum team member. You will learn how to assume the responsibilities of a ScrumMaster and to guide the development team, a project, or an organisation into Agile practice by fostering the adoption of new attitudes, collaborative processes and working to remove institutional barriers.

While the Scrum Alliance provides a list of core concepts that must be covered in the class, each instructor creates his or her own material, allowing courses to differ based on the strengths, interests, and experiences of the instructor. Martine's interest, research and experience has focused on planning and estimation techniques and as such this ScrumMaster Certification course covers Agile Estimation and Planning techniques in particular depth.

Upon completion of this ScrumMaster course, you will know how to use Scrum to maximise value creation, improve customer and employee satisfaction as well as engineering practices and tools. Additionally, upon successful completion of the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year Scrum Alliance membership, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information is available..

Objectives

Assume the responsibilities of a ScrumMaster
Remove the barriers between development and the customer so that the customer/Product Owner directly drives development
Improve employee and customer satisfaction
Improve accuracy of estimation and planning
Improve the engineering practices and tools so each increment of functionality is potentially shippable

Format

The course blends tutorial, class discussion, question and answer sessions, and demonstrations/simulations.

Introduction

Agile Values and Scrum Origins
Scrum and Change
Empirical Process Control
Companies Using Scrum

Scrum Process and Roles

Scrum Flow, Iterative-incremental Software Development and Shippable Product Increments
The Role of the Product Owner
The Role of the Team including Team Dynamics, Team Norms and the Visual Workplace
The ScrumMaster Role including Conflict Management, Appraisals and Appointing the ScrumMaster
The Role of Project Managers and Functional Managers in Scrum

Requirements Management

Software Overproduction
The Product Backlog
Prioritisation Techniques

Release Management

Sustainable Pace
Estimating and Planning
Tracking

Working with Sprints

Sprint Workflow and Characteristics
Sprint Planning Preparation
Sprint Estimating and Planning
Daily Scrum
Sprint Review and Retrospective
Sprint Reporting

Large and Distributed Scrum Projects

Brook’s Law
Organic Growth and Conway’s Law
Master Product Backlog and the Product Owner Team
Team Set-up
Multi-team Planning and Coordination
Shared Norms and Assets
Distributed Scrum Project Tips
Sample Distributed Project Org

Getting Started in Scrum

Just Do It
The Nature of Change
Scrum Adoption Stages
Change Practices including the Enterprise Transition Team and the Transition Product Backlog
Deming’s PDCA Cycle
The Role of Consultants

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Cloud Computing Event(Course Ref SS64)

Date: 22-23 September 2009
Venue: Dublin Croke Park.
Times: 2.00pm - 6.00pm
Email Alicia.Hunt@ibec.ie for details

Overview

Cloud Computing Workshop Agenda for Tuesday 22nd September 2009

Chair Sean Baker

Time	Agenda	Speakers
14:00	Start, Introductions	Sean Baker/Ben Hurley (NDRC)
14:05	Introduction to Cloud Computing	Joe Drumgoole
15:00	Amazon Overview	Attila Narin
15:30	Google Overview	Eoghan Nolan
16:00	Microsoft Overview	Steve McGibbon
16:30	COFFEE BREAK
17:00	Real World Use Case	Sean O'Sullivan (Local Social)
17:30	Panel Discussion	Moderator: Sean O'Sullivan
	IBM	Pol Mac Aonghusa
	HP	Jamie Kelly
	SAP	Maik Linders
	Amazon	Attila Narin
	Google	Eoghan Nolan
	Microsoft	Steve McGibbon
18:00	Technical Workshop Review	Joe Drumgoole
18:10	Closing Remarks	ISA Director

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Software Testing Event(Course Ref: SS-61)

Dates: Wed 17th June 2009
Venue: Holiday Inn, Pearse Street, Dublin
Times: 12.30pm – 2.00pm
Fee: Free to Software Skillnet members - please register with Anna Donegan at anna.donegan@ibec.ie

Evolution of new feature verification in Ericsson & Software Testing and Global Industry

To read the full outlines for the above topics, please click here.

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ISTQB Advanced Test Manager (Course Ref: SS-68)

Dates: Mon 31st August - Friday 4th September
Venue: Ericsson Offices, Clonskeagh, Dublin
Times: 9.30am - 5.00pm

Course Overview

Following on from the ISTQB Foundation Certificate, the Advanced Test Manager Certificate provides the next level of knowledge and practical expertise in the ISTQB Advanced Certification scheme. It is one of three certified courses at Advanced level (the other two being Advanced Test Analyst and Advanced Technical Test Analyst).

The 5 day tutor led course has been designed to enable participants understand, apply and analyse key testing principles and processes.

Who Should Attend?

This course is aimed at testing practitioners, responsible for organising and improving the testing process, i.e. project managers, project leaders, test managers, test team leaders, senior test personnel and test analysts.

Successful completion of the ISTQB Foundation Certificate is a pre-requisite to taking the ISTQB Advanced Certificate examination.

What will you learn?

Upon completion of this course you will be able to:

Define the overall testing goals and strategy for the systems being tested.
Plan, schedule and track the tasks
Describe and organize the necessary activities
Select, acquire and assign the adequate resources to the tasks.
Select, organize and lead testing teams
Organise the communication between the members of the testing teams, and between the testing teams and all other stakeholders.
Justify the decisions and provide adequate reporting information where applicable.

Course Contents an overview

Introduction

Basic aspects of software testing

Testing in the software lifecycle

Specific systems (systems of systems, safety critical etc.)

Metrics & measurement

Testing Processes

Test planning & Control

Test Implementation & Execution

Evaluating exit criteria & execution

Test Closure Activities

Test Management

Test Management Documentation

Test Plan Documentation

Test Estimation

Scheduling Test Planning

Test Process Monitoring & Control

Business value of Testing

Distributed, outsourced and in sourced Testing

Risk-based testing

Introduction

Risk Management

Risk Management in the lifecycle

Failure modes and effects analysis

Test Management Issues

Reviews

Principles of Reviews

Introducing Reviews

Success factors for Reviews

Incident Management

Standards & Test Improvement Process

Improving the Test Process

Test Tool Automation

Test tool Concepts

Test Tool Categories

People Skills

Individual Skills

Test Team Dynamics

Fitting Testing within an organization

Motivation

Communication

Course Timetable

Day	Topic Areas
1	Introduction to Test Manager Syllabus Basic Aspects of Software Testing Testing Processes Standards and Test Improvement Process
2-4	Test Management Reviews
5	Incident Management Test Tools & Automation People Skills - Team Composition

Handout Materials

Presentation Slides

Syllabus

Glossary

Exercises and model answers

Sample Exam Paper and Answers

Certification

Standard ISTQB Examination

Reference Material

ISTQB Syllabus

ISTQB Glossary

The full Syllabus and Glossary can be downloaded from the ISTQB website: http://www.istqb.org/. All references can be found in the syllabus.

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JAVA Conference (Course Ref: SS-66)

Dates: Wed 30th September 09
Venue: Cork, Radisson Blu Hotel, Little Island, Cork
Times: 2.00pm – 6.00pm

Agenda

Speakers include Manik Surtani, JBoss, Ben Hale, SpringSource, Kevin Noonan, Independent Developer and Simon Ritter, Sun Microsystems.

More details are available by clicking here.

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Test Driven Development(Course Ref: SS-102)

Dates: 3 day course - Dates to be Confirmed
Venue: Dublin
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm

Overview

Generally this course will cover the following topics over a 3 day period.

Introduce Test Driven Design
- Customer Acceptance Tests
- Unit Tests
Using Mocks and Stubs to Unit Test
Code Smells
Improve the quality of code by refactoring
Test Automation
Continuous Integration
Introducing TDD to a legacy code base safely.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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ISEB Foundation Certificate in Business Analysis (Course Ref: SS-103)

Dates: May 2010 - Date to be confirmed
Venue: Dublin
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm

Overview

This certificate is concerned with some of the fundamental aspects of business analysis. Its focus is on using a holistic approach to the investigation and improvement of business situations with a view to developing effective, feasible business solutions.

There are two key elements to the syllabus: the development of a business strategy and the exploration of a business issue, whether a problem or opportunity. For the first element, candidates are required to understand a range of strategic analysis and performance management techniques. For the second element, they are required to be able to apply business analysis techniques within a defined framework.

The certificate is awarded to those who pass a one-hour multiple-choice examination, which is normally given in the afternoon of the third day of the course. There are no specific pre-requisites for entry to the examination, however candidates should be suitably prepared and possess the appropriate skills and knowledge to fulfil the objectives above. Candidates who are awarded a pass for the examination are awarded the ISEB Foundation Certificate in Business Analysis.

Course objectives

Holders of the ISEB Foundation Certificate in Business Analysis should be able to:

Describe how a business strategy is developed.
Use strategic analysis techniques.
Describe the need for project discipline.
Explain techniques to investigate an organisation's business systems.
Describe an approach to improving business systems.
Explain the importance of stakeholder management and use a stakeholder analysis technique.
Use techniques for the analysis and modelling of business systems.
Describe how recommendations for business improvement may be identified.
Describe the contents of a rigorous business case for the development and implementation of business changes.
Identify costs, benefits, impacts and risks for an option in a business case.
Explain the derivation of it requirements from the definitions of business improvements.
Explain the importance of assuring the business case once the changes have been implemented.

Course outline

A typical outline of an ISEB Foundation Certificate in Business Analysis is outlined below.

1. Rationale

A lifecycle for business change
The role of the business analyst
A comparison of the business analyst and systems analyst roles
Purpose of analysing and modelling business systems
Overview of business analysis approach (overview model showing roadmap/workflow)

2. Strategic analysis in context

Identifying the business domain
Internal environment analysis
External environment analysis
Swot analysis
Overview of areas of strategy, including IS strategy
Critical success factors and key performance indicators
The balanced business scorecard

3. Project discipline for business analysis studies

Terms of reference/project initiation
Business and project objectives
Deliverables from business analysis studies

4. Understanding the situation/issues

Stakeholder analysis
Overview of investigative techniques
Representation of the business situation

5. Business perspectives

Identifying different perspectives
Defining business perspectives
Identifying and resolving conflicts

6. Analysing and modelling business activities

Identifying activities
Identifying dependencies
Building a business activity model
Business events/activity triggers
Business rules/constraints

7. Identifying potential solutions

Gap analysis - comparing the ideal and existing systems
Defining a new business model (the processes, people and organisation)
Identifying is/it requirements to support the new business model

8. Making the business case

Structure of a business case
Identifying options for business change
Identifying costs and benefits
Identifying impacts
Identifying risks
Principles of risk analysis and management
Presenting a business case

9. Accepting the business case

Testing the system for user acceptance
Managing the implementation of change
Realising the business benefits

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Managing Project Risk(Course Ref: SS-104)

Dates: To Be Confirmed
Venue: Dublin
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm

Overview

To be Confirmed

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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ISTQB Foundation in Software Testing (Course Ref: SS-105)

Dates: Mon 22nd - Wed 24th March 2010
Venue: Grand Canal Hotel, Dublin
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm

Overview

The ISTQB was officially founded as an International Testing Qualifications Board in Edinburgh in November 2002, by members of the ISEB Software testing Board together with representatives from other countries.

The idea and proposal for the ISTQB, stemmed from the original ISEB view of Software Testing and the need for an international Software Testing Qualification. The International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) role is to support a single, universally accepted, international qualification scheme, aimed at software and system testing professionals.

The ISTQB Foundation certificate is awarded to all those who successfully complete a one-hour, multiple choice examination. The examination is externally set and invigilated by ISEB.

An ISTQB Advanced level qualification equivalent to the ISEB Practitioner has now also been developed to allow a progression route for participants completing the Foundation Course.

Who Should Attend

Quality analysts
Testers
Developers
Systems analysts
Project leaders
Users
Data administrators

No specific prerequisites are assumed. Attendees are expected to be ‘software knowledgeable’ with some minimal test of software experience.

Examination

This introduction to software testing provides participants with the knowledge and expertise to undertake the ISTQB examination for the Foundation Certificate offered at the end of the third day.

Course Objectives

Those attending the course will learn:

The fundamental principles of Software Testing
How testing fits into the development lifecycle
The importance of test process, objectives, techniques and tools
Essential functional and non-functional test methods
Basic test design and measurement techniques
Fundamental test management principles
How to select and implement tools effectively

Course Outline

Introduction

Fundamentals of Testing
Why is testing necessary?
What is testing? General testing principles
Fundamental test process
The psychology of testing

Testing through the lifecycle

Software development models
Test levels
Test types – the targets of testing
Maintenance testing

Static Reviews

Reviews and the test process
Review process
Static analysis by tools

Test design techniques

Identifying test conditions and designing test cases
Categories of test design techniques
Specification-based or black-box techniques
Structure-based or white-box techniques
Experience-based techniques

Test Management

Test Organisation
Test planning and estimation
Test process monitoring and control
Configuration Management
Risk and Testing
Incident Management

Tool Support for Testing

Types of test tool
Effective use of tools: potential benefits and risks
Introduction of a tool into an organisation

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Ruby on Rails (Course Ref: SS-106)

Dates: Monday 24th - Thursday 27th May 2010
Venue: Cork.
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm

Overview

This Ruby on Rails training course would teaches attendees how to build web applications using the powerful Rails framework.

Ruby on Rails Training Objectives

- Know how to install and configure Ruby, Rails, and any associated packages

- Understand the Rails request cycle

- Explore the Model-View-Controller architecture for server-side applications

- Learn to program the major components of Rails, including Active Record, Action

- Controller, and Action View

- Learn Ruby fundamentals

- Configure databases for Rails

- Do test driven development of Rails applications

Ruby on Rails Training Outline

The Rails World

Rails overview and walkthrough
What you do with Rails, and why
Framework principles and tradeoffs
The Model-View-Controller framework architecture
Creating a new Rails application
The Rails application directory layout
Rails request-handling and URL parsing
Customizing the application's routing
Deploying with Mongrel
The Rails philosophy: "Convention over configuration"

Ruby Skills and Tools

Objects and methods
Scalars: strings, numbers, dates and times
Collections: arrays, hashes
Sorting and filtering collections
Classes and modules
Control flow and conditionals
Interactive Ruby (IRB)
Attributes
Iterators
Exception and error-handling

Database Creation and Configuration

Basic MySQL™ creation commands
Configuring database.yml

Working with ActiveRecord Models

Modeling a domain
Generating models with script/generate
ActiveRecord models and Ruby classes
ActiveRecord associations
Writing Rails-friendly SQL
Data validation techniques
Avoiding SQL injection

Database maintenance with ActiveRecord Migrations

Automatically-generated migrations
Custom migrations
Writing accurate "down" methods
Keeping migrations in sync

ActionView Essentials

HTML/ERb (Embedded Ruby) templates
Partial templates
Built-in and custom helper methods
Layouts
The 'flash' facility
Avoiding HTML injection

Using ActionController

Creating controllers with script/generate
Planning and writing actions
Controller/view communication via instance variables
The special params hash
Filter methods for specific actions
Redirecting actions
Explicit rendering commands
Session management

Working with Forms in Rails

ActionPack form helper methods
"Magic" form-field population
Processing forms
Hash-based batch processing of CGI data

Testing in Rails

Writing fixtures
Generating fixtures from a database
Unit testing
Functional testing

Ajax, JavaScript, and RJS

JavaScript facilities and support in Rails
Basic DOM updating with Ajax calls
RJS templates

Rails Supporting Rails

The Rails application console
The source code tree
The API docs

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Prince 2 Foundation in Project Management (Course Ref: SS-107)

Dates: Mon 22nd - Wed 24th March
Venue: Grand Canal Hotel, Dublin
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm

Overview

PRINCE2™ (Projects IN a Controlled Environment) is a leading edge approach to managing projects. With the launch of PRINCE2™ also came its recognition as the de facto standard for managing projects, not just in the IT/IS environment, but for projects of any size and complexity, run in any industry sector.

This is an intensive three-day course leading to delegates sitting the PRINCE2™ Foundation examination on the final day.

Who should attend?

This course is aimed at anyone wishing to gain the qualification and needing to understand the terminology and principles behind the method.

This course would benefit:

Project Managers
General Managers
Programme Managers
Project Team Managers and support staff
Staff who will have a defined role
Project Management Consultants

Course Content:

This course would follow a syllabus to prepare delegates to pass the PRINCE2™ Foundation Paper.

Upon successful completion of the course, students would have:

Gained a basic knowledge and understanding of project management and project-based work.
Identified the difference between a project and a process.
Been introduced to the components, elements and processes of PRINCE2™ and the relationships that bind them together.

Course Topics would include areas such as:

Introduction to Project Management
Overview of PRINCE2™
Starting up a project
The Project Management Team Initiating a project
The Business Case
Risk and Quality Management
All aspects of Planning Controls
Managing Stage Boundaries
Quality in a PE Controlling a Stage
Managing Product Delivery
Change Control
Configuration Management and Project Closure

Comprehensive course documentation would be provided, including a copy of the OGC’s “Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2”

Delegates must undertake a period of self-study using materials provided before the course. In addition there is a requirement for evening work to be completed throughout the course. The Foundation examination, a one-hour multiple choice questionnaire exam, takes place in the afternoon of the third day.

To Book this Course Please Click Here

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Software Testing Event (Course Ref: SS-108)

Dates: Wed 17th February 2010
Venue: IBEC Offices, Dublin
Times: 5.00pm – 7.30pm
Fee: Free to Software Skillnet members - please register with Anna Donegan at anna.donegan@ibec.ie

Sarah Murphy, Xilinx: Title: Lean Test Process Improvement in Agile Testing

The presentation will introduce the audience to the Lean Philosophy and use a case study to demonstrate how test process improvement can be driven from the bottom-up very effectively by empowering the team members of the Test Process Improvement initiative. The removal of waste (anything that doesn’t add value) is at the core of the Lean Philosophy.

Ensuring that the test process is as efficient and effective as it can be facilitates an agility within testing and empowers the test effort to react to change positively and agilely.

The presentation will :

- demonstrate how a team of testers came together and contributed to the improvement of various testing processes and activities.

- address how “easy“ change becomes within the testing organization when it is driven by the testers themselves.

- show how test management can facilitate the empowering of its testers while still maintaining a decorum of control.

- address how the usual resistance to change was surmounted by a TPI effort driven by those who are executing the testing.

- include feedback from a recently held Retrospective with Lessons Learned clearly elaborated on.

Scott Armstrong, SQS UK:Title: Test Automation: A Roadmap for Success

The presentation :

- aims to debunk the myth that one automation tool fits all; it is essential to tailor and plan the tools and technologies involved to deliver an effective solution.

- highlight that automation is not a panacea for a struggling testing project. In the right circumstances and with the correct strategy, test automation can provide impressive returns on investment, but these efforts must be carefully targeted.

- discuss the factors that need to be considered and the steps that should be taken to ensure the successful delivery of an automation project, and will highlight the problems that are often encountered when deploying a new tool.

- include case studies of SQS Automation projects which ill illustrate these principles in action

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Software Testing Event(Course Ref: SS-109)

Dates: Thur 18th February 2010
Venue: Cork International Airport, Cork
Times: 4.00pm – 6.00pm
Fee: Free to Software Skillnet members - please register with Alison at alison@itcork.ie

Sarah Murphy, Xilinx: Title: Lean Test Process Improvement in Agile Testing

The presentation will introduce the audience to the Lean Philosophy and use a case study to demonstrate how test process improvement can be driven from the bottom-up very effectively by empowering the team members of the Test Process Improvement initiative. The removal of waste (anything that doesn’t add value) is at the core of the Lean Philosophy.

Ensuring that the test process is as efficient and effective as it can be facilitates an agility within testing and empowers the test effort to react to change positively and agilely.

The presentation will :

- demonstrate how a team of testers came together and contributed to the improvement of various testing processes and activities.

- address how “easy“ change becomes within the testing organization when it is driven by the testers themselves.

- show how test management can facilitate the empowering of its testers while still maintaining a decorum of control.

- address how the usual resistance to change was surmounted by a TPI effort driven by those who are executing the testing.

- include feedback from a recently held Retrospective with Lessons Learned clearly elaborated on.

Scott Armstrong, SQS UK:Title: Test Automation: A Roadmap for Success

The presentation :

- aims to debunk the myth that one automation tool fits all; it is essential to tailor and plan the tools and technologies involved to deliver an effective solution.

- highlight that automation is not a panacea for a struggling testing project. In the right circumstances and with the correct strategy, test automation can provide impressive returns on investment, but these efforts must be carefully targeted.

- discuss the factors that need to be considered and the steps that should be taken to ensure the successful delivery of an automation project, and will highlight the problems that are often encountered when deploying a new tool.

- include case studies of SQS Automation projects which ill illustrate these principles in action.

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Certified ScrumMaster Training (Course Ref SS130)

Date: Tuesday 6th & Wednesday 7th July 2010
Venue: Letterkenny
Times: 9.30am - 5.00pm

Overview
Leading a Scrum team is radically different to traditional project management. Rather than plan, instruct, and direct, the leader of a Scrum team (called a ScrumMaster) facilitates, coaches, and leads. In this ScrumMaster Certification course, you will learn the essentials of working as a ScrumMaster or Scrum team member. You will learn how to assume the responsibilities of a ScrumMaster and to guide the development team, a project, or an organisation into Agile practice by fostering the adoption of new attitudes, collaborative processes and working to remove institutional barriers.

While the Scrum Alliance provides a list of core concepts that must be covered in the class, each instructor creates his or her own material, allowing courses to differ based on the strengths, interests, and experiences of the instructor. Martine's interest, research and experience has focused on planning and estimation techniques and as such this ScrumMaster Certification course covers Agile Estimation and Planning techniques in particular depth.

Upon completion of this ScrumMaster course, you will know how to use Scrum to maximise value creation, improve customer and employee satisfaction as well as engineering practices and tools. Additionally, upon successful completion of the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year Scrum Alliance membership, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information is available..

Objectives

Assume the responsibilities of a ScrumMaster
Remove the barriers between development and the customer so that the customer/Product Owner directly drives development
Improve employee and customer satisfaction
Improve accuracy of estimation and planning
Improve the engineering practices and tools so each increment of functionality is potentially shippable

Format

The course blends tutorial, class discussion, question and answer sessions, and demonstrations/simulations.

Introduction

Agile Values and Scrum Origins
Scrum and Change
Empirical Process Control
Companies Using Scrum

Scrum Process and Roles

Scrum Flow, Iterative-incremental Software Development and Shippable Product Increments
The Role of the Product Owner
The Role of the Team including Team Dynamics, Team Norms and the Visual Workplace
The ScrumMaster Role including Conflict Management, Appraisals and Appointing the ScrumMaster
The Role of Project Managers and Functional Managers in Scrum

Requirements Management

Software Overproduction
The Product Backlog
Prioritisation Techniques

Release Management

Sustainable Pace
Estimating and Planning
Tracking

Working with Sprints

Sprint Workflow and Characteristics
Sprint Planning Preparation
Sprint Estimating and Planning
Daily Scrum
Sprint Review and Retrospective
Sprint Reporting

Large and Distributed Scrum Projects

Brook’s Law
Organic Growth and Conway’s Law
Master Product Backlog and the Product Owner Team
Team Set-up
Multi-team Planning and Coordination
Shared Norms and Assets
Distributed Scrum Project Tips
Sample Distributed Project Org

Getting Started in Scrum

Just Do It
The Nature of Change
Scrum Adoption Stages
Change Practices including the Enterprise Transition Team and the Transition Product Backlog
Deming’s PDCA Cycle
The Role of Consultants

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Customer Excellence (Course Ref: SS-111)

Dates: Mon 22nd - Thurs 25th March
Venue: Dublin
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm

Training Outcomes

Technical support teams will know how and when to use a variety of questioning and listening techniques, to determine the real causes of the problem and develop solutions.

They will understand how their behaviour contributes to the customers’ perception of the company.
They will investigate their contribution to the reduced downtime and increased profitability of the clients
They will appreciate how the technical skills and the soft skills support each other
They will create a plan to apply the new learning in the workplace

Day one

The role of technical support
What is their role?
How their solutions contributes to client workforce productivity
How the client uses its workforce productivity as a measure of customer satisfaction

Taking control of communication
Using language the customer can understand
What are barriers?
Using your voice as a business tool
Understanding the communication funnel
How the customer filters your message
It’s not what you say it’s what they hear

Identifying needs
Understanding the customer revolution
Question techniques – why and when to use them
The difference between listening and hearing
Active listening

Day Two

Technical expertise plus tact
Negotiating skills
Characteristics of an effective support person
Evaluating the call from the customers perspective
Dynamics of satisfaction and loyalty
Characteristics of users
Reliance on technology
Managing Fast finger Freddy and other personalities

Managing the telephone call
What annoys you and are you contributing to the situation
Opening the call
Identifying the problem
Explaining the unexpected behaviour of the software
Providing solutions or guidance in using the software
Handling difficult calls
Using the escalation process

Responding to criticism
Using fogging and negative assertion
The six step SOFTEN technique

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Customer Service for Technical Support (Course Ref: SS-112)

Dates: Mon 29th March - Thursday 1st April
Venue: Cork
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm

Day 1 – Call handling technique and managing self

The purpose of the first day is to ensure that agents have an understanding of and have practiced best practice in call handling techniques. Relevant practical exercises taken from their daily phone call types will be used.

Details on the various types of customers and how to serve them best will be incorporated. Agents will practice sales call structures and closing the sale scenarios.

Agents will also learn techniques to handle their own attitude and emotions on a call and how to be able to handle calls with more confidence.

The day is practical exercise and role-play driven and examples will come from daily practice.

Specific topics covered in Day one

What’s missing in Telephone Communication?
To begin, participants will explore Alfred Mehrabian’s study on communication and how it effects telephone communication. Participants will also learn the role that body language plays in telephone communication.

Verbal Communication
This session will cover the four E’s of an effective telephone voice and how you can use them to promote a service image.

Who are Your Customers?
In this session, participants will learn about what a customer is, and they will identify some of their own customers.

To Serve and Delight
This session will give participants an opportunity to develop strong, helpful phrases for assisting customers.

Listening Skills
During this session, participants will learn techniques for active listening and staying focused.

Asking the Right Questions
In this session, participants will learn about open and closed questions and probes.

Sales by Phone
This session will discuss how to use information delivery and rapport building to help participants sell over the phone.

Structure of a sales call
This session will outline the various parts of a sales call, from opening questions to selling the benefits of the products. This session will break down their call types into practical roadmaps for handling calls.

Closing down the Voice
This session will give participants a chance to practice some vocal exercises.

Closing the Sale
Next, participants will develop good questions that can help them close a sale.

Managing the self
Being a proficient agent will require a lot of skill in managing your emotions and responses, each of us has a unique style of communicating and sometimes this is not the most appropriate. In this session agents will learn techniques to handle their own emotions and style, which will improve the customer and agent experience.

Target practice
Agree targets and objectives for practice for the coming week on the phone.

Day 2 – Script development and handling objections

The purpose of Day 2 is to build on and fine-tune skills obtained in the first day. We will kick off with feedback from using the skills in practice, as well as targets achieved or missed.

This day is focussed on improving skills for scripting, handling objections and advanced selling techniques.

Once again, examples and role plays will come from the daily call practice and these will drive learning of techniques.

Scripts developed throughout the various groups and training days will be made available to agents after the course.

Feedback on practice in reality from day 1
In this session we will review whether targets and objectives set at the end of day 1 were achieved. This is a discussion-based session, with a focus on how the team could have handled calls and workload better and where are they already comfortable and confident. We will incorporate listening to some excellent examples and listening to calls with room for improvement.

Cold and Warm Calls
During this session, participants will learn about these two types of calls and how to maximize their efficiency in each.

Developing a Script
Scripts can be an effective tool, particularly for cold calls. This session will give participants a chance to lay out the framework for their script.

Perfecting the Script
Next, participants will learn ways to customize their scripts. We will also look at FAQ sheets and how they can help participants on a daily basis.

Going Above and Beyond
This session will give participants 15 techniques for success and some ways to customize their service.

Selling the benefits
How do you identify the product benefits?
What are the various success stories of clients?
How can you use benefits in your call?
In this session we will use existing stories of how clients have used VMWare products to improve their working life and develop a benefit listing by customer type.

Handling Objections
During this session, participants will learn different ways to address objections.

Feelings
During this session, participants will work in pairs to rewrite dry and less than imaginative statements to show empathy for their customers.

Negotiation
Negotiation is a key skill for contact centre success. During this session, participants will learn four things that they can do to become better negotiators.

It's More than Just a Phase
Next, participants will learn about the four phases of negotiation and some different types of negotiation.

High Impact Moments
This session will explore some situations where you come into contact with a client or customer at a time when you can have a huge impact on them.

Phone Tag and Getting the Call Back
While today’s technology can make it hard to reach a decision maker, it also provides opportunities. This session will give participants some tools to deal with phone tag.

Dealing with Difficult Customers
This session will give participants nine easy techniques for managing difficult customers. We will also look at how to deal with vulgarity.

Day 3 & 4 – Skills fine-tuning, setting yourself up for success and minimum stress

We will focus back on topics discussed in day 1 and 2, where weaknesses or inconsistencies have been noticed in agents’ behaviour in the centre.

We will also look at further self-management and workload management techniques. Agents will be introduced to targets and feedback structure as well as how to focus on their high priority goals.

We will also look at techniques on managing stress, which is essential in a call centre environment. Again, examples and exercises will be taken from the daily workload.

Feedback and overview putting the skills into practice
A discussion-based session on how objectives were met and how they can improve. Did we reach our objectives?

Self-assessment based on evaluation form
Listening to calls relevant to each group with self-assessment feedback based on the management assessment form, which will be used in the future for agent evaluation. Constructive feedback will be the focus of this session, as well as praise for a job well done.

Review of topics identified as weak points

Targets, objectives and your focus
Based on targets laid out by centre management, agents will revise where they are relative to these, how to structure their work load in such a way that the targets are achievable and how to stay focussed on high priorities.

Stress Busting
We all need techniques for managing the stress in our lives. This session will encourage participants to develop some personalized ways to manage stress.

Staying positive
In a selling environment it is important to stay positive, as individuals and in group the agents will identify ways of staying positive under pressure and how they can help each other to stay on the right track.

Customer experience
In this session we will focus on the ultimate customer experience and how agents can help deliver the best possible customer experience for each of the customer types identified in previous training sessions.

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Better Business Writing (Course Ref: SS-113)

Dates: Thurs 25th, Wed 31st March and Thurs 1st April
Venue: Cork
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm

Overview

This workshop is designed to give the participants an understanding of the importance of written communication in delivering the core message of the company brand. Specifically, it will present the techniques to create documents or emails with a clear, logical structure to organise their ideas and key points. It addresses the difficulties of communicating where the support person or the customer is using English as a second language. This workshop presents active management of the written communication process as an essential skill in getting the information from others, setting clear direction, building trust and maintaining professionalism in the face of difficulties. It will have a practical, hands-on focus with the participants creating and completing the exercises with an actual report or type of email in mind.

Objectives
Having completed this training the participants will:
- Have a clear understanding of the communication issues and how to handle them
- Understand that professional writing is a career skill
- Have a systematic method to prepare and present their reports
Have practiced the techniques and created an action plan to apply them

Report writing
- Writing to be understood
- Who are your audience?
- Using a logical sequence
- Chunking and Linking
- Choosing the correct voice
- Creating a template

Using email as a business tool
Having completed the session the participants will:
- Understand the importance of a positive customer experience in maintaining the Trend Micro brand
- Create effective emails for internal engineers
- Learn some techniques for managing customer expectations
- Use email as a business communication tools
- Examine the range of communication strategies available to you
- Structuring your email
- Mastering Spelling, Punctuation & Usage
- Six tips for Better Spelling

Practical Exercises
- Punctuation Pointers
- Word Usage Quiz and practice
- Critique of real examples of emails and reports
- Exercises to practise achieving high levels of professionalism and readability
- Creating a template
- A team exercise in preparing and writing a report, using all the learning points from the course

Personal Action Plans
Personal action plans for improving written communication professionalism and effectiveness

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Product Management/Successful Software Commercialisation (Course Ref: SS-114)

Location: Clontarf Castle, Dublin
Dates: Tuesday 1st and Wednesday 2nd June

BOOK YOUR PLACE

Who Should Attend?:

Those in the Technology Sector who are new product managers, practicing product managers, seeking a refresher course or programme/ project management, engineering and marketing managers or staff that share duties or collaborate with product management

Outline

Product Manager Role and Function
An introduction to the Key Process Areas of Product Management, the role and responsibilities of the Product Manager, where this role fits in the organisation and how it interacts with other company departments. Implement product management functions and processes to maximise your product success.

Market Analysis
Market Research process, information sources, customers and competition. Understand the importance of market intelligence for strategic decision-making. Validate product concepts with the market before costly implementation.

Product Strategy
Articulate your product goals and define a winning strategy approach based on opportunities/ business cases derived from market analysis.

Strategic Pricing
Avoid common pricing mistakes. Understand the relationship between costs, customers and competition and maximise your profits by learning how to implement a value-based pricing strategy.

Requirements Management
Ensure product specification contains only features/ functionality that customers are willing to pay for. Include all relevant stakeholders in requirements elicitation process ensuring that you avoid costly development mistakes.

Positioning
Understand where your product fits in relation to the competition. Understand where the opportunities are to provide unique benefit to your target customer, and articulate this message clearly to them.

Product Planning
Identify clearly your target audience, and efficiently manage your resources, processes and deliverables to ensure product success.

Go-To-Market - Planning
Create implementation plans, including Product Launch and Social Media Marketing plans that allow you to realise your product strategy.

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SQL Immersion 2010 (Course Ref: SS-115)

Venue: The Auditorium, EPDC 2, South County Business Park, Leopardstown
Dates: 28th June to 1st July

Paul and Kimberly are also hosting two 2 day masterclasses in Level 400, click here

OVERVIEW

This level 300 course provides a unique opportunity for Developers and DBAs who wish to focus on achieving excellence in SQL Server to learn directly from renowned world experts, Paul S Randal and Kimberly L Tripp. Delegates who attend will acquire essential knowledge that can quickly be applied in production to improve performance, reliability, availability and scalability.

The event offers a three track option to delegates: full immersion; Developer; and DBA: to facilitate a more tailored programme.

Immersion Events are unique and individually planned seminars and workshops, with content specifically created by database-related industry experts. The training materials are customized to provide deep coverage enabling attendees to master the content. These RARE, small and intense events are the place to be for high quality SQL Server training.

The goal of an Immersion Event is to provide you with many ways of learning. In the course of an intense and focused week, we will ensure that nothing gets in your way. Our goal is to challenge you and offer you many different possible opportunities to explore and reinforce what you are learning and these are not limited solely to the classroom. We strive to enhance your learning experience through networking and mixed training formats:

Classroom lectures with printed course materials
Detailed and realistic demos
Free-form individual troubleshooting

CONTENT

This event is intense, technical and focused. Plan on finally having the time to focus on the areas of SQL Server that you have always wanted to explore, and bringing back detailed knowledge to enhance your company deployment and make it more reliable, more secure, more scalable and easier to support. Our SQL Server content is always current and relevant for the latest version, right to the latest Service Pack

See below for information on the course and its content

Day 1 SQL Server Internals
- On-disk structures: how the data is stored
  - Records, pages, allocation bitmaps
- Index internals: how the data is organised
- Logging & recovery: how the data is protected
  - What is logging?
  - How Recovery works
  - How the transaction log is structured
  - Recovery Models
Day 2 Designing for Performance
- Choosing the RIGHT Data Type
  - Understanding data types
  - Character data, overflow & LOB
  - LOB considerations
  - Date and time data types
  - Heterogeneous data types
  - Sparse columns
  - Application inconsistencies in types
- Table & Index Partitioning Strategies
  - Concepts / motivating factors in partitioning
  - SQL Server 2000+ Partitioned Views
  - SQL Server 2005+ Partitioned Tables
  - Partitioning Design Techniques Combined
  - Partitioned & Non-Partitioned Indexes
  - Implementing the Sliding Window Scenario
Day 3 Indexing for Performance
- Data Access
  - Data Access Patterns
  - Covering
  - Using INCLUDE (SQL Server 2005 +)
  - Using Filters (SQL Server 2008+)
- Indexing Strategies
  - Indexing for AND
  - Indexing for OR
  - Indexing for JOINS
  - Indexing for Aggregates
  - Indexed Views (Overview)
Day 4 Essential Database Maintenance
- Data & Log file provisioning & management
  - Database layout considerations
  - Growing & shrinking
  - Instant initialization
- Tembdb
- Index & statistics maintenance
- Using backup and restore
- Consistency checking

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Red Hat Linux (System Administration) (Course Ref: SS-116)

Date to be confirmed
Location to be confirmed
Fee to be confirmed

BOOK YOUR PLACE

Introduction

For users of Linux (or UNIX) who want to start building skills in systems administration on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, to a level where they can attach and configure a workstation on an existing network. See complete details below

Audience

Linux or UNIX users, who understand the basics of Red Hat Linux, that desire further technical training to begin the process of becoming a system administrator.

Prerequisites

RH033 Red Hat Linux Essentials or
or equivalent experience with Red Hat Linux

Goal

An operator who can perform system administration tasks to a level where he/she can install, configure, and attach a new Red Hat Linux workstation to an existing network.

Course Content

Unit 1 Package Management
Manage software on system using yum, Red Hat Network, and rpm.
Unit 2 System Initializating
Define boot process, recover system, and manage service startup.
Unit 3 Kernel Services
Explore kernel modules and variants, tune kernel parameters, manage devices, and monitor processes and resources.
Unit 4 System Services
Configure and access various consoles to manage system logging, time synchronization, printers, and task automation.
Unit 5 Filesystem Management
Expand storage by adding new filesystems and swap space. Configure autofs for on-demand network storage.
Unit 6 User Administration
Create, modify and delete users, groups, and policy. Escalate privileges. Establish collaborative group directories.
Unit 7 Network Configuration
Configure dynamic and static network settings for both IPv4 and IPv6.
Unit 8 Advanced User Administration
Revisit user administration by connecting to network directory services like NIS and LDAP. Protect users and groups through ACLs, quotas, and SELinux.
Unit 9 Advanced Filesystem Management
Back up your data. Manage filesystems using Software RAID and Logical Volume Management.
Unit 10 Installation
Perform both interactive and automated installations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Unit 11 Virtualization with Xen
Install the xen environment and create a para-virtualized user domain running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Unit 12 Troubleshooting
Explore troubleshooting methodologies while defining standard things to check. Maintain system from different runlevels. Utilize the rescue environment of anaconda.

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Java Programming for Developers (Course Ref: SS-117)

Date to be confirmed
Location Dublin
Fee to be confirmed

BOOK YOUR PLACE

This training course covers the core components of the Java Programming Language. The training course is designed to teach programmers of other languages the skills needed to learn how to write robust, platform independent Java applications leveraging the power and flexibility of the Java 2 platform.

Layout

This training course combines lectures with practical exercises that help the delegates to put what they have learned on the training course into practice. The exercises specifically build on what has been recently taught and are built up as the training course progresses.

Who it is for

This training course is for developers who need to be able to develop applications using the Java programming language.

Training Course Prerequisites

The training course assumes that delegates are already programmers. They will already understand the need for flow control, variables, operators and functions, and indeed have used them in other language contexts.
It assumes no knowledge of the object-oriented paradigm as object oriented theory is also covered in the content of the training course.

Training Course Objectives

At the end of this training course, students should be able to:

Understand the Java runtime environment and the role of the virtual machine
Identify and use the Java primitive datatypes
Use the Java flow control constructs
Understand the difference between classes and objects
Implement instance data, methods, constructors, and method overloading
Understand and implement the concept of inheritance
Define the role of an interface, and be able to create and use one
Create a Java applet
Understand the concept of static data and methods
Understand the concept of polymorphism and be able to take advantage of it using Java
Be able to implement the Java Collections API
Build a Java user interface using the Swing APIs
Implement the Java event handling model
Build error handling blocks into applications
Understand how to work with Databases from Java
Understand how FileIO and Networking is implemented using Java
Implement inner classes using Java and identify where they can be used

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The Irish Software Show - Epicentre 2010

Date: June 8th-11th 2010
Venue: Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin
Cost: Special Rates for small companies through the Software Skillnet

To book tickets at special rates through the Software Skillnet click here

For more information on the event click here http://epicenter.ie/2010.html

The Software Skillnet are providing places for 30 small companies to attend this National Software Event at the special grant aided prices shown above.Companies are eligible if they employ less than 30 staff and any number of places can be booked. To avail of the special rates email susan@isa-skillnet.com

Event outline:
epicenter is four days of software excellence - it's a conference for learning, it's an expo for researching, it's a place for meeting! It's for software architects, CTO's and developers of all knowledge and experience levels.

The Irish Software Show is organised by IrishDev.com and included 74 Sessions over 4 days. The epicenter conference is 'the place' to come to hear expert programming tips and tricks in the latest and greatest movements for the software, web and technology worlds. There are over 100 sessions covering Java, Open Source, Microsoft, Web, Enterprise, Mainframe (yes, you read right!) Databases, Mobile, Agile, Cloud and Virtualisation...plus much more!

In addition to the conference sessions, there are free-to-attend product reviews taking place each day, ideal for the CIO who wants to see what's coming along the line, but without the need to deep-dive into the underlying technology.

Speakers and case studies on each day will cover

Business best practices and Tools
Client Server
Web
Cloud and Mobile

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Oracle SQL Tuning Masterclass (SS-176)

Date: Thursday 11th & Friday 12th November 2010
Duration: 2 days (9.00am to 5.30pm)
Venue: 4400 Cork Airport Business Park, CORK

OVERVIEW

On a welcome return to Cork following his two sold-out sessions for it@cork last year, International Oracle author, trainer and expert, Dan Hotka, will illustrate coding techniques that ensure a consistent response time between instances and releases of the Oracle database. He focuses on performance tuning of actual SQL statements, as well as covering a variety of Oracle Server tuning topics.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

This programme is perfect for developers who need to know more on how Oracle works and how to get their SQL to perform better. It is also good for those who have limited exposure to SQL tuning or perhaps are new to the Oracle RDBMS.

PREREQUISITES

A working knowledge of the SQL language. Knowledge of SQL Explain Plans is helpful but not necessary.

COURSE OBJECTIVES/LEARNING OUTCOMES

Participants will have the opportunity to ask the tough Oracle questions and a handson opportunity to learn more about Oracle, TOAD and/or SQL Developer.

They will learn:

How Oracle arrives at an Execution Plan
In-depth look at Explain Plans
Advanced problem-solving topics using V$ Table information
SQL Trace/Stats Pack
PL/SQL Tuning/Profiling
SQL problem-solving topics using V$ Table information
Lectures and topics are enhanced with live illustrations and hands-on exercises

ATTENDEES RECEIVE

Study guide with presentations and relevant white papers
Course files full of tuning and problem discovery scripts
Opportunity to ask the tough Oracle questions
A hands-on opportunity to learn more about Oracle, TOAD and/or SQL Developer

COURSE CONTENT

The course starts out with a complete overview of the Oracle architecture, so students can get an understanding how their SQL and applications can take advantage of the computing environment. It then moves to a discussion on the differences of the various Explain Plan steps such as Merge-Join and Nested-Loop, and when is it best to use each. Dan goes into considerable detail, with SQL examples, on how the optimizers (both rule and cost) make their decisions. Participants will work with a variety of SQL statements, reviewing explain plans and making changes to make these SQL statements perform better. They will also experience how to monitor their application environment, and see how to find problem SQL in their applications.

This workshop includes a section on monitoring Oracle RDBMS and SQL via the v$ tables and TOAD and is packed full of scripts to discover a variety of issues.

The course utilizes a variety of current tools. Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about TOAD and SQL Developer, as well as the Oracle tools like SQL*Plus, TKProf, and Stats Pack.

SUMMARY COURSE OUTLINE

SQL Statement Tuning

- Oracle RDBMS Architecture overview
- Understanding/Reading/Interpreting Explain Plans
- Understanding the Rule-based Optimizer
- Understanding the Cost-based Optimizer
- Working with Hints

SQL Tuning Tools

- Tuning Tool Review: Statspack, Events, Tracing/Tkprof
- Profiling and tuning PL/SQL
- Finding Problem SQL using v$ information

ABOUT DAN HOTKA

Dan Hotka is a Training Specialist who has over 31 years in the computer industry and over 26 years of experience with Oracle products. He is an internationally recognized Oracle expert with Oracle experience dating back to the Oracle V4.0 days. Dan’s latest book is the TOAD Handbook by Pearson. He is also the author of SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, Oracle9i Development By Example, and Oracle8i from Scratch by Que and has co-authored 7 other popular books including the Database Oracle10g Linux Administration by Oracle Press. He is frequently published in Oracle trade journals, and regularly speaks at Oracle conferences and user groups around the world.

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Oracle SQL Tuning Masterclass (SS-120)

Date: Tuesday 9th & Wednesday 10th November
Venue: Dublin
Duration: 2 days (9.00am to 5.30pm)

DESCRIPTION

On a welcome return to Dublin following his two sold-out sessions last year, International Oracle author, trainer and expert, Dan Hotka, will illustrate coding techniques that ensure a consistent response time between instances and releases of the Oracle database. He focuses on performance tuning of actual SQL statements, as well as covering a variety of Oracle Server tuning topics.

PREREQUISITES

A working knowledge of the SQL language. Knowledge of SQL Explain Plans is helpful but not necessary.

TOPICS COVERED

How Oracle arrives at an Execution Plan
In-depth look at Explain Plans
Advanced problem-solving topics using V$ Table information
SQL Trace/Stats Pack
PL/SQL Tuning/Profiling
SQL problem-solving topics using V$ Table information
Lectures and topics are enhanced with live illustrations and hands-on exercises

ATTENDEES RECEIVE

Study guide with presentations and relevant white papers
Course files full of tuning and problem discovery scripts
Opportunity to ask the tough Oracle questions
A hands-on opportunity to learn more about Oracle, TOAD and/or SQL Developer

COURSE OVERVIEW

The course starts out with a complete overview of the Oracle architecture, so students can get an understanding how their SQL and applications can take advantage of the computing environment. It then moves to a discussion on the differences of the various Explain Plan steps such as Merge-Join and Nested-Loop, and when is it best to use each. Dan goes into considerable detail, with SQL examples, on how the optimizers (both rule and cost) make their decisions. Participants will work with a variety of SQL statements, reviewing explain plans and making changes to make these SQL statements perform better. They will also experience how to monitor their application environment, and see how to find problem SQL in their applications.

This workshop includes a section on monitoring Oracle RDBMS and SQL via the v$ tables and TOAD and is packed full of scripts to discover a variety of issues.

The course utilizes a variety of current tools. Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about TOAD and SQL Developer, as well as the Oracle tools like SQL*Plus, TKProf, and Stats Pack.

SUMMARY COURSE OUTLINE

SQL Statement Tuning

- Oracle RDBMS Architecture overview
- Understanding/Reading/Interpreting Explain Plans
- Understanding the Rule-based Optimizer
- Understanding the Cost-based Optimizer
- Working with Hints

SQL Tuning Tools

- Tuning Tool Review: Statspack, Events, Tracing/Tkprof
- Profiling and tuning PL/SQL
- Finding Problem SQL using v$ information

ABOUT DAN HOTKA

Dan Hotka is a Training Specialist who has over 31 years in the computer industry and over 26 years of experience with Oracle products. He is an internationally recognized Oracle expert with Oracle experience dating back to the Oracle V4.0 days. Dan’s latest book is the TOAD Handbook by Pearson. He is also the author of SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, Oracle9i Development By Example, and Oracle8i from Scratch by Que and has co-authored 7 other popular books including the Database Oracle10g Linux Administration by Oracle Press. He is frequently published in Oracle trade journals, and regularly speaks at Oracle conferences and user groups around the world.

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FREE SEMINAR with Dan Hotka (SS-121)

Date: Monday 8th November 2010
Duration: IBEC Offices, 4.30pm - 6.30pm
Venue: Dublin
Cost: Software Skillnet Members Go Free !!!

A "MUST SEE" for anyone doing Oracle SQL Tuning - Get a thorough understanding of how the COST BASED OPTIMIZER works.

BOOK THIS SEMINAR

Understanding Explain Plans - Dan covers:

· Useful Explain Plan tools and scripts

· Regular SQL Explain Plans

· Parallel SQL Explain Plans

CURRENT BIO:

Dan Hotka is a Training Specialist who has over 32 years in the computer industry and over 27 years of experience with Oracle products. He is an accepted member of the Oracle Ace group. He is an internationally recognized Oracle expert with Oracle experience dating back to the Oracle V4.0 days. Dan’s latest book is the TOAD Handbook by Pearson. He is also the author of SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, Oracle9i Development By Example, and Oracle8i from Scratch by Que and has co-authored 7 other popular books including the Database Oracle10g Linux Administration by Oracle Press. He is frequently published in Oracle trade journals, and regularly speaks at Oracle conferences and user groups around the world.

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Programming with Python (SS-122)

Date: Tuesday 29th & Wednesday 30th June 2010
Venue: Apple Cork, Hollyhill Industrial Estate
Duration: 2 day course (9.00am to 5.30pm)

BOOK THIS COURSE

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Python is powerful, portable, object- oriented open source programming language for writing stand alone programs, quick scripts, and prototypes for large applications. This will cover the fundamentals of Python - statements, variables, comments, conditionals and loops. It will also cover Python's collections - Lists, Tuples and Dictionaries. Functions, modules and packages and the use of and creation of data types (objects) in Python.

Object oriented principles and capabilities are built in to the Python language, and the course will address how these can be exploited most effectively.

TRAINEE REQUIREMENTS

Prior programming experience in another language such as Perl, Java, Basic or C.

COURSE OUTLINE

This course will be based on lectures, classroom exercises and class discussions covering the following topics:

Basic language principles;

Execution models, the Python interpreter and IDE support;

Basic types and control flow;

Defining and using functions;

Operating on files – input and output;

Analysing text with regular expressions;

Data structures – lists, tuples and dictionaries;

Defining and using modules;

Classes and objects

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Rapid Software Testing (SS-125)

Date: Monday 13th to Wednesday 15th September 2010
Venue: Xilinx, Citywest Business Park
Duration: 3 day course (9.00am to 5.30pm)

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Rapid Software Testing is a three-day, hands-on class that teaches testing as a sophisticated thinking art. The philosophy presented in this class is not like traditional approaches to testing, which ignore the thinking part of testing and instead advocate never-ending paperwork. Products have become too complex for that, time is too
short, and testers are too expensive. Rapid testing uses a cyclic approach and heuristic methods to constantly re-optimize testing to fit the needs of your clients. The Rapid approach isn't just testing with a speed or sense of urgency; it's mission-focused testing that eliminates unnecessary work, assures that everything necessary gets done, and
constantly asks what testing can do to speed the project as a whole. This class presents an approach to testing that begins with developing personal skills and extends to the ultimate mission of software testing: lighting the way of the project by evaluating the product.

One important tool of rapid testing is the discipline of exploratory testing—essentially a testing martial art. Exploratory testing combines test design, test execution, test result interpretation, and learning into a seamless process that finds a lot of problems quickly. If you are an experienced tester, you'll find out how to articulate those intellectual processes of testing that you already practice intuitively. If you're a new tester, hands-on testing exercises help you gain critical experience.

COURSE OUTLINE

In this Rapid Software Testing course, the attendee will learn:

• How to focus on the mission and hit the ground running, tackling the
testing of any product or product idea instantly

• How to analyze, select, and use concise and effective heuristics,
models, and practices for rapid test design

• How to test expertly despite ambiguous, missing, or constantly
changing specifications

• How to deal with potentially overwhelming complexity or confusion

• How to decide when to start, suspend, or stop testing—or how to
continue while steering in a different direction

• How to prepare and deliver credible test reports at any time

ABOUT MICHAEL BOLTON

Michael Bolton is an established and recognised leading-edge expert in the area of Software Testing. Michael has extensive experience in delivering workshops, tutorials, and conference presentations on the topic of Rapid Software Testing. He has over 20 years of experience in the computer industry testing, developing, managing, and writing about software.

:

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SQL Immersion 2010 (Course Ref: SS-126)

Venue: The Auditorium, EPDC 2, South County Business Park, Leopardstown

OVERVIEW

These Master Classes are best attended only by those who have previously attended an Immersion level event or who have a good working knowledge of the following concepts: SQL Internals, On Disk Structures, Index B-Tree Structures and performance tuning concepts such as Wait Stats, perfmon counters and DMV’s.

Performance Optimizatin Master Class

In this course, Paul and Kimberly focus on best practices in scalable code, monitoring system and resource utilization, as well as governing it and finally will analyze the health of your indexes and overall indexing strategy. When dealing with resource troubleshooting, Paul and Kimberly will introduce three core concepts in understanding how your SQL Server is performing – waits, queues and locks – and they will explain how to investigate performance issues related to them. Following on from this two new features in SQL Server 2008 that allow resources to be constrained to protect critical workloads and perform very in-depth troubleshooting are introduced. Click here for further information

Disaster Recovery Master Class

Disasters happen - plain and simple. When disaster strikes a database you're responsible for, are you going to be able recover within the down-time and/or data-loss limits your company requires? This workshop isn't about how to achieve high-availability, it's about how to prevent or overcome the obstacles you're likely to hit when trying to recover from a disaster such as not having the right backups, not having valid backups, or not having any backups! How do you come up with a good and reliable backup strategy? How can you architect a database to allow easier recovery? What can you do to limit the damage a disaster causes? In this demo-heavy workshop, you will see a ton of tips, tricks, and techniques that have been learned from years of experience helping customers plan for and recover from disasters. Click here for further information

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Certified ScrumMaster Training (Course Ref SS141)

Date: To be confirmed
Venue: Cork
Times: 9.30am - 5.00pm

Overview
Leading a Scrum team is radically different to traditional project management. Rather than plan, instruct, and direct, the leader of a Scrum team (called a ScrumMaster) facilitates, coaches, and leads. In this ScrumMaster Certification course, you will learn the essentials of working as a ScrumMaster or Scrum team member. You will learn how to assume the responsibilities of a ScrumMaster and to guide the development team, a project, or an organisation into Agile practice by fostering the adoption of new attitudes, collaborative processes and working to remove institutional barriers.

While the Scrum Alliance provides a list of core concepts that must be covered in the class, each instructor creates his or her own material, allowing courses to differ based on the strengths, interests, and experiences of the instructor. Martine's interest, research and experience has focused on planning and estimation techniques and as such this ScrumMaster Certification course covers Agile Estimation and Planning techniques in particular depth.

Upon completion of this ScrumMaster course, you will know how to use Scrum to maximise value creation, improve customer and employee satisfaction as well as engineering practices and tools. Additionally, upon successful completion of the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year Scrum Alliance membership, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information is available..

Objectives

Assume the responsibilities of a ScrumMaster
Remove the barriers between development and the customer so that the customer/Product Owner directly drives development
Improve employee and customer satisfaction
Improve accuracy of estimation and planning
Improve the engineering practices and tools so each increment of functionality is potentially shippable

Format

The course blends tutorial, class discussion, question and answer sessions, and demonstrations/simulations.

Introduction

Agile Values and Scrum Origins
Scrum and Change
Empirical Process Control
Companies Using Scrum

Scrum Process and Roles

Scrum Flow, Iterative-incremental Software Development and Shippable Product Increments
The Role of the Product Owner
The Role of the Team including Team Dynamics, Team Norms and the Visual Workplace
The ScrumMaster Role including Conflict Management, Appraisals and Appointing the ScrumMaster
The Role of Project Managers and Functional Managers in Scrum

Requirements Management

Software Overproduction
The Product Backlog
Prioritisation Techniques

Release Management

Sustainable Pace
Estimating and Planning
Tracking

Working with Sprints

Sprint Workflow and Characteristics
Sprint Planning Preparation
Sprint Estimating and Planning
Daily Scrum
Sprint Review and Retrospective
Sprint Reporting

Large and Distributed Scrum Projects

Brook’s Law
Organic Growth and Conway’s Law
Master Product Backlog and the Product Owner Team
Team Set-up
Multi-team Planning and Coordination
Shared Norms and Assets
Distributed Scrum Project Tips
Sample Distributed Project Org

Getting Started in Scrum

Just Do It
The Nature of Change
Scrum Adoption Stages
Change Practices including the Enterprise Transition Team and the Transition Product Backlog
Deming’s PDCA Cycle
The Role of Consultants

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Microsoft Certified IT Professional (Course Ref SS167)

Start Date: 1st September 2010
Venue: Limerick, Raheen Business Park
Times: Wednesday evenings from 5pm to 8pm

COURSE OVERVIEW

The Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) certification provides the ideal way to Demonstrate an ability to use Windows Server 2008 to excel in a specific, market relevant job role.

The Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) certification helps validate that an individual has the comprehensive set of skills necessary to perform a particular job role, such as database administrator or enterprise messaging administrator. MCITP certifications build on the technical proficiency measured in the Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) certifications. Therefore, you will earn one or more MCTS certifications on your way to earning an MCITP certification.

Candidate profile

MCITP candidates are IT professionals capable of deploying, building, designing, optimizing, and operating technologies for a particular job role. They make the design and technology decisions necessary to ensure successful technology implementation projects. Candidates should have at least one year of experience implementing and administering a network operating system.

Why get certified?

Earning a Microsoft Certification helps validate your proven experience and knowledge in using Microsoft products and solutions. Designed to be relevant in today’s rapidly changing IT marketplace, Microsoft Certifications help you utilize evolving technologies, fine-tune your troubleshooting skills, and improve your job satisfaction. Whether you are new to technology, changing jobs, or a seasoned IT professional, becoming certified helps demonstrate to customers, peers, and employers that you are committed to advancing your skills and taking on greater challenges. In addition, certification provides you with access to exclusive Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) resources and benefits, including opportunities to connect with a vast, global network of MCPs.

COURSE OBJECTIVES/LEARNING OUTCOMES

Upon completion of this course; the participant will have validated their ability to handle day-to-day management of the server operating system, file structure, and directory services; handle software distribution and updates; monitor servers; provide tier-2 troubleshooting support; support engineering and change-management projects; build and configure servers; implement auditing policy; perform scheduled vulnerability-assessment scans; and monitor logs for firewalls and intrusion-detection systems.

Course Delivery:

This course will be run over a period of 48 learning days - one evening per week from 5.00 - 8.00pm for 42 weeks with 6 exam prep sessions: one evening per week from 5.00 - 8.00pm

Microsoft Official Curriculum course materials will be provided for each of the five courses that constitute the certificate (i.e. 5 sets of course materials for each participant). Transcender Exam prep materials will also be provided for all three exams.

The programme will cover exam preparation for the following exams:

1. Exam 070-642 TS: Windows Server 2008 Network Infrastructure, Configuring http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-642&locale=en-us

2. Exam 083-640 TS: Windows Server 2008 Active Directory, Configuring http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-640&locale=en-us

3. Exam 070-646 TS: Pro: Windows Server 2008, Server Administrator http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-646

Details on the official curriculum can be accessed on the links provided

COURSE CONTENT:

The Microsoft official course outlines for each of the five courses that will lead to the MCITP certification are referenced below:

1. 6421A Configuring and Troubleshooting a Windows Server 2008 Network Infrastructure http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/course.aspx?id=6421A&locale=en-us#tab1

2. 6425B Configuring and Troubleshooting Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Domain Services http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/course.aspx?ID=6425A

3. 6426B Configuring and Troubleshooting Identity and Access Solutions with Windows Server 2008 Active Directory http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/course.aspx?ID=6426A&locale=en-us

4. 6419A Configuring, Managing and Maintaining Windows Server 2008 Servers http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/course.aspx?id=6419A&locale=en-us#tab3

5. 6430B Planning for Windows Server 2008 Servers http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Course.aspx?ID=6430B&Locale=en-us

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Difficult Situation Handling (Course Ref SS127 & SS128)

Date: 30th - 31st August 2010
Venue: Trend Micro premises, Cork
Times: 8.30am to 4.00pm

OVERVIEW

This two day course is for people on the front line of customer service, whether over the phone, via email/ online; or face to face specifically within a Technical Support Environment.

It is designed to give you tools to better handle difficult situations, to make the most of customer contact, to negotiate more effectively to develop loyal customers and to learn how to take care of yourself as well. Participants will learn superior techniques and skills aimed at improving levels of competence and confidence when dealing with customers - in particular, how to handle the difficult conversations with customers who can sometimes be angry, abusive, challenging and awkward.

During this 2 day workshop we look at what sets the standard for excellent customer service, how to ensure you get forgiven your mistakes, how to make customers feel welcome and how to define that indefinable 'extra' and exceed customer expectations.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

This workshop is specifically designed for customer care representatives, technical support engineers and analysts within a Technical Support Environment.

BENEFITS

You will be provided with a structure for dealing with customers across all aspects of the relationship.
You will clearly understand your customer's point of view and demonstrate the skills necessary for effective communication and the ability to manage customers' heightened demands and expectations.
You will learn to maximise the customers experience to encourage them to return and others to do the same.
Enable you to deal with difficult, rude or indifferent customers and handle difficult situations more effectively for a positive outcome.
Negotiate more effectively with customers and develop customer relationships by caring for yourself as well as your customers and confidently handle complaints with empathy and efficiency gaining confidence in your Customer Service role.

CONTENT

What is the Core vs. Client Service
Current Reality vs. Vision
Balancing volume: quality versus quantity
Levels of Service Expected - review of stakeholders needs and wants.
Understanding the differing Mindsets
Relationship Model: hitting our customers’ “Hot Buttons”
RapportBuilding & 4 Client Desires
Dealing with Difficult Situations: using the ASAP technique with the irate caller
Dealing with Angry Clients
HEAR Model for Communicating more effectively: listening & questioning techniques
Assertiveness Methods and Techniques
Coping strategies for dealing with difficult customers
Dealing with the Foreign Accent
Avoiding Emotional Leakage – from one customer to the next.

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Advanced Negotiation & Service Recovery Skills (Course Ref SS129)

Date: 3rd September 2010
Venue: Trend Micro premises, Cork
Times: 8.30am to 4.00pm

OVERVIEW

This intensive one day advanced course builds on the skills taught in the 2 day programme and is for people on the front line of customer service dealing with escalated situations whether over the phone, via email/ online; or face to face specifically within a Technical Support Environment.

Participants will learn superior techniques and skills aimed at improving levels of confidence when dealing with escalated queries from customers - in particular, how to handle the difficult situations arising from customers’ escalated issues.

During this 1 day workshop we look at what our customers want at this particular stage of escalation, how to determine what customers want, and evaluate the service provided. Participants will also learn how to create, implement, and monitor service standards to engendering a customer service climate and foster customer loyalty.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

This workshop is specifically designed for customer care representatives, technical support engineers and analysts within a Technical Support Environment.

BENEFITS

You will be provided with a structure for dealing with escalated customers across all aspects of the relationship.
Learn practical techniques and strategies for dealing with angry customers
Increase your confidence in dealing with escalated calls
Win people over, build and maintain trust and make a positive impact when negotiating
Be more aware of the impact your persuasion style has on others and be able to vary it as needed
Assert yourself when faced with strong characters
Fundamentals of negotiation: finding a point of balance with customers

What our customers want – the “Permanent Positives”
The Respect vs Quality Matrix
The customer journey – the right interaction at the 5 key stages
Understanding customer loyalty development and employee loyalty’s influence
Creating a Memorable service
How to make the Customers Point of View Work for you
Caring for Yourself as well as your Customers
Handling Complaints with Empathy and Efficiency
Mastering the areas of hidden and open influence in difficult negotiations
What is in it for me?: What makes people say yes, taking into account people’s principles and values, beliefs and opinions, needs and necessities, wants and wishes

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Use Case Driven Development with UML (Course Ref: SS-168)

Dates: Mon 18th - Wednesday 20th October 2010
Venue: Cork
Times: 9.30am – 5.00pm

OVERVIEW

Use Case Driven Development with UML (UCDD/UML)presents the concepts and techniques necessary to effectively use system requirements, captured using use cases, to drive the development of a robust design model.

In this intensive, hands-on workshop, participants learn to apply the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and fundamental object-oriented analysis and design concepts using the core UML diagrams

Use Case
Activity
Sequence
Collaboration
Class
State

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

This workshop is intended for practitioners who desire an understanding of object-oriented analysis and design concepts using UML, as well as hands-on practical experience applying the techniques. This includes analysts, designers, and software developers.

OBJECTIVES

Upon completion of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Apply a use case-driven, architecture-centric process to the development of a robust design model.

• Use the UML to represent the design model.

• Apply the concepts of abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism.

• Understand the different views of a software architecture, the key mechanisms that are defined in support of that architecture, and the effect of the architecture and mechanisms on the produced design.

• Describe some basic design considerations, including the use of patterns.

CONTENT

• Introduction to Use-Cases

Overview of the basic Use-Case Modelling concepts (Actors, Use-Cases, Associations)

and the associated Requirements Artefacts (Use Case Model, Use Case Specification, Supplementary Specification, Glossary)

• OO Concepts and UML Overview

An overview of the basic OO concepts (Abstraction, Encapsulation, Objects, Classes, Relationships, Polymorphism, Interfaces, Subsystems) and their UML representation

• Use Case Analysis

Techniques for identifying the initial classes from Use-Case Specifications, allocating responsibilities to these classes, describing the required class collaborations to deliver the Use-Case functionality, as well as the class

relationships that must exist to support these collaborations.

• Defining the Architecture

Techniques for defining the initial Architecture for the system. Introduces 3-Tier, MVC, and Layered Architectures.

• Moving from Analysis to Design

Techniques for moving from the initial analysis model produced in Use Case Analysis to the more formal design model

• Implementing Architectural Design Patterns

Refinement of the initial architecture to incorporate key design and implementation patterns for mechanisms such as persistence and security.

• Use Case Design

Techniques for refining the collaborations initially developed during ‘Use Case Analysis’ to incorporate the defined architectural patterns and design elements, as well as techniques for designing the internals of subsystems identified during ‘Analysis to Design’

• Class Design

Techniques for designing the internals of the design classes, including the modelling of any state-controlled behaviour. The refinement of the class relationships and the incorporation of basic patterns are also described.

• Introducing Design Patterns

Introduces some commonly used Design Patterns from the Gang-of-Four (Gamma et al.) book - Singleton, Factory, Abstract Factory, and State

Materials Provided

Upon attending the UCDD/UML workshop, each student will receive the following:

• Student Manual

• Sample Requirements documentation, if required

Structure & Layout

Lecture & Exercises.

The workshop is paper based and delivered independently of any CASE tool.

Sample Project

The workshop comes with a set of sample Requirements, in Use-Case format, which can be used as the basis for the hands-on exercises.

Connecting Web Parts

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Software Skillnet Certified ISEB Diploma in Business Analysis(Course Ref SS173)

Dates

Module	Module Name	Dates taking place
Module 2	Requirements Engineering	18th - 20th October 2010
Module 1	Business Analysis	6th - 8th December 2010
Module 3	Modelling Business Processe	23rd - 24th May 2011
Module 4	Organisational Context	14th - 15th April 2011

Venue: To be Confirmed, Dublin
Times: 9.30am to 5.00pm
Fee: See pricing table below

The costs below are grant-aided prices for eligible participants. This constitutes up to 40% savings on normal ISEB prices. A number of places on this course have been allocated to unemployed participants – Unemployed participants should contact the network office to check if places are still available.

COURSE PRICING

	Module / Qualification Awarded	Duration	Grant aided Cost per participant	Exam cost per participant (Exams are optional)	Total cost per participant for course and qualification
Module 1	ISEB Certificate in Business Analysis Essentials	3 days	€560	€190	€750
Module 2	ISEB Certificate in Requirements Engineering	3 days	€560	€190	€750
Module 3	ISEB Certificate in Organisational Context	2 days	€420	€190	€610
Module 4	ISEB Certificate in Modelling Business processes	2 days	€420	€190	€610
Diploma Exam	ISEB Diploma in Business Analysis			€300	€300

OVERVIEW

The Information Systems Examinations Board (ISEB) is part of BCS (British Computer Society). ISEB is an international examination body created to raise the standard of competence and performance of people working in IT. The qualifications are internationally recognised and are a key accreditation for people working in the IT, software or consultancy sectors.

The Diploma and Certificate programmes being offered by the Software Skillnet are a range of qualifications covering the subject of business analysis, change management and consultancy.

These qualifications can allow IT professionals to gain an understanding of the business context for IT, by studying one of the individual certificate modules. The ISEB qualifications allow candidates to learn new skills in specific business and IT areas which measure competence, ability and performance. This helps to promote career development and provide a competitive edge for employees.

Through the Software Skillnet Participants can take 2-3 day courses to achieve one of the following qualifications at ‘practitioner’ level.

ISEB Certificate in Business Analysis,
ISEB Certificate in Requirements engineering,
ISEB Certificate in Organisational Context,
ISEB Certificate in Modelling Business Processes.

Participants can also receive the highest level award by taking all 4 modules

ISEB Business Analysis Diploma.

WHO THIS COURSE IS AIMED AT

Project Managers, Business Analysts, Test Managers.

Part 1 – Business Analysis Essentials (3 Days) - TAKING PLACE 6th - 8th DECEMBER 2010

Business Analysis Essentials provides participants with the skills they need to become effective business analysts. A range of business analysis techniques including SWOT analysis, stakeholder management, and business activity modelling and gap analysis are explored. During the course, participants will be encouraged to apply these techniques in the context of a business analysis assignment. The stages of this assignment will include the investigation of the business situation, analysis of key issues and their root causes, gap analysis to establish the business problems as well as the identification and evaluation of possible solutions.

DOWNLOAD COURSE OBJECTIVES FOR BUSINESS ANALYSIS ESSENTIALS

Part 2 – Requirements Engineering (3 Days) - TAKING PLACE 18TH - 20TH OCTOBER 2010

Requirements Engineering presents a range of key techniques for discovering, analysing and documenting business and system requirements. The emphasis of the course is very much on providing participants with ‘hands on’ experience of actually using the techniques as they work through a realistic case study scenario.

DOWNLOAD COURSE OBJECTIVES FOR REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING

Part 4 – Organisational Context (2 Days) - TAKING PLACE 14TH & 15th APRIL 2011

Organisational Context provides Business Analysts with a firm foundation in the basics of business. The course examines various types of enterprises, their legal status and the variety of ways that they might be structured. Key aspects of financial accounting (such as financial ratios) and management accounting (such as investment appraisal) are also considered together with a wide range of legal considerations. The course demonstrates how the enterprise's structure, objectives and environment help define the role of the business analyst.

DOWNLOAD COURSE OBJECTIVES FOR ORGANISATIONAL CONTEXT

Part 3 – Modelling Business Processes (2 Days) - TAKING PLACE 23rd & 24th MAY 2011

Modelling Business Processes offers practical, proven techniques for modelling, analysing and improving business processes. A hierarchic approach is taken to process improvement. These approach analyses and models three levels of business process and also examine important related issues such as human performance and process measurement. Theoretical concepts are supported by a detailed case study which gives the opportunity for participants to apply their knowledge to both AS-IS and TO-BE process models.

DOWNLOAD COURSE OBJECTIVES FOR MODELLING BUSINESS PROCESSES

Duration

Qualification Award after exam

This course gives Credits towards

Module 1

Business Analysis Essentials

3 days

ISEB Certificate in Business Analysis

ISEB Diploma in Business Analysis

Module 2

Requirements Engineering

3 days

ISEB Certificate in Requirements engineering

ISEB Diploma in Business Analysis

Module 3

Organisational Context

2 days

ISEB Certificate in Organisational Context

ISEB Diploma in Business Analysis

Module 4

Modelling Business processes

2 days

ISEB Certificate in Modelling Business Processes

ISEB Diploma in Business Analysis

Additional Oral exam after all 4 courses are completed for Diploma Qualification

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Oracle SQL Tuning Masterclass (SS-175)

Date: Tuesday 9th & Wednesday 10th November 2010
Duration: 2 days (9.00am to 5.30pm)
Venue: 22 Westland Square, DUBLIN

The cost of the course includes all materials, equipment, refreshments and lunches for both days.

OVERVIEW

Following his two sold-out sessions last year, International Oracle author, trainer and expert, Dan Hotka, will illustrate coding techniques that ensure a consistent response time between instances and releases of the Oracle database. He focuses on performance tuning of actual SQL statements, as well as covering a variety of Oracle Server tuning topics.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

This programme is perfect for developers who need to know more on how Oracle works and how to get their SQL to perform better. It is also good for those who have limited exposure to SQL tuning or perhaps are new to the Oracle RDBMS.

PREREQUISITES

A working knowledge of the SQL language. Knowledge of SQL Explain Plans is helpful but not necessary.

COURSE OBJECTIVES/LEARNING OUTCOMES

Participants will have the opportunity to ask the tough Oracle questions and a handson opportunity to learn more about Oracle, TOAD and/or SQL Developer.

They will learn:

How Oracle arrives at an Execution Plan
In-depth look at Explain Plans
Advanced problem-solving topics using V$ Table information
SQL Trace/Stats Pack
PL/SQL Tuning/Profiling
SQL problem-solving topics using V$ Table information
Lectures and topics are enhanced with live illustrations and hands-on exercises

ATTENDEES RECEIVE

Study guide with presentations and relevant white papers
Course files full of tuning and problem discovery scripts
Opportunity to ask the tough Oracle questions
A hands-on opportunity to learn more about Oracle, TOAD and/or SQL Developer

COURSE CONTENT

The course starts out with a complete overview of the Oracle architecture, so students can get an understanding how their SQL and applications can take advantage of the computing environment. It then moves to a discussion on the differences of the various Explain Plan steps such as Merge-Join and Nested-Loop, and when is it best to use each. Dan goes into considerable detail, with SQL examples, on how the optimizers (both rule and cost) make their decisions. Participants will work with a variety of SQL statements, reviewing explain plans and making changes to make these SQL statements perform better. They will also experience how to monitor their application environment, and see how to find problem SQL in their applications.

This workshop includes a section on monitoring Oracle RDBMS and SQL via the v$ tables and TOAD and is packed full of scripts to discover a variety of issues.

The course utilizes a variety of current tools. Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about TOAD and SQL Developer, as well as the Oracle tools like SQL*Plus, TKProf, and Stats Pack.

SUMMARY COURSE OUTLINE

SQL Statement Tuning

- Oracle RDBMS Architecture overview
- Understanding/Reading/Interpreting Explain Plans
- Understanding the Rule-based Optimizer
- Understanding the Cost-based Optimizer
- Working with Hints

SQL Tuning Tools

- Tuning Tool Review: Statspack, Events, Tracing/Tkprof
- Profiling and tuning PL/SQL
- Finding Problem SQL using v$ information

ABOUT DAN HOTKA

Dan Hotka is a Training Specialist who has over 31 years in the computer industry and over 26 years of experience with Oracle products. He is an internationally recognized Oracle expert with Oracle experience dating back to the Oracle V4.0 days. Dan’s latest book is the TOAD Handbook by Pearson. He is also the author of SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, Oracle9i Development By Example, and Oracle8i from Scratch by Que and has co-authored 7 other popular books including the Database Oracle10g Linux Administration by Oracle Press. He is frequently published in Oracle trade journals, and regularly speaks at Oracle conferences and user groups around the world.

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FREE SEMINAR with Dan Hotka (SS-174)

Date: Monday 8th November 2010
Duration: 4.30pm - 6.30pm
Venue: IBEC Offices, Dublin
Cost: Software Skillnet Members Go Free !!!

A "MUST SEE" for anyone doing Oracle SQL Tuning - Get a thorough understanding of how the COST BASED OPTIMIZER works.

Understanding Explain Plans - Dan covers:

· Useful Explain Plan tools and scripts

· Regular SQL Explain Plans

· Parallel SQL Explain Plans

CURRENT BIO:

Dan Hotka is a Training Specialist who has over 32 years in the computer industry and over 27 years of experience with Oracle products. He is an accepted member of the Oracle Ace group. He is an internationally recognized Oracle expert with Oracle experience dating back to the Oracle V4.0 days. Dan’s latest book is the TOAD Handbook by Pearson. He is also the author of SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, Oracle9i Development By Example, and Oracle8i from Scratch by Que and has co-authored 7 other popular books including the Database Oracle10g Linux Administration by Oracle Press. He is frequently published in Oracle trade journals, and regularly speaks at Oracle conferences and user groups around the world.

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Introduction to OSGi Framework with Ian Bull of Eclipse Source (SS-162)

Date: Thursday 9th September 2010
Duration: 5.45pm - 7.15pm
Venue: IBEC Offices, DUBLIN
FREE TO ALL MEMBERS

To register for this event, please email susan@isa-skillnet.com with your name and job title.

OVERVIEW

This talk is meant as an introduction to OSGi and targets both architects and developers. During the talk we will demonstrate OSGi's module system and discuss how it enables "single sourcing" — a technique that allows developers to deploy the same application across a variety of environments, including rich client and web based platforms.

Like it or not, the world needs boundaries. The saying “Good fences make good neighbours” has translations in many languages with good reasons. Boundaries set expectations and form the basis of contracts between the parties. With Java’s traditional module, the Jar file, engineers are unable to effectively specify API, describe proper dependencies, encode meaningful version information — or more generally, set proper boundaries. Without these established principles of modularity, the software assembly process becomes difficult to maintain and error prone.

OSGi is an open specification with several concrete implementations that delivers a proven, mature solution, for deploying truly modular software. OSGi is celebrating its 10th birthday and is currently leveraged in thousands of commercial organizations around the globe, deployed on millions of users desktops and is even used to manage NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity missions on Mars.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

Software Architects and Software Developers

LEARNING OUTCOMES

By the end of the talk you will understand:

How OSGi can be used to design and deploy highly modular systems
The role versioning plays a in a software system
The ways in which OSGi enables consistent developer skills across a variety of execution environments
API design and how designing proper boundaries improves developer productivity
The state of the art of OSGi tooling

ABOUT IAN BULL

Ian is the component lead for Zest, the Eclipse visualization framework and a committer on the Equinox p2 project. Ian is also an avid proponent of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) and has studied how MDE can play a role in the design and generation of information visualizations. His interests include software architecture, component oriented design, human-computer interaction and just about everything related to software engineering. Ian holds a PhD from the University of Victoria.

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Two Futures of Software Testing with Michael Bolton (SS-188)

Date: Tuesday 14th September 2010
Duration: 6.00pm - 7.30pm
Venue: IBEC Offices, DUBLIN
FREE TO ALL MEMBERS

To register for this event, please email susan@isa-skillnet.com.

OVERVIEW

Niels Bohr, Woody Allen, or Yogi Berra (perhaps all three) once said "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." Michael rises to the challenge and dares to present TWO futures of software testing. In one vision, testers are the gatekeepers, responsible for assuring product quality. Testing follows a rigorously controlled process. Changes to the product are resisted so that risk can be eliminated. This is the dark vision of the future. In the other view, the bright future, testers are active investigators, critical thinkers, and highly skilled, valued members of the project team. Testers neither accept nor desire responsibility for releasing the product; instead, they provide important, timely, credible information to managers so that sound and informed business decisions can be made. Most importantly, testers embrace challenge and change. Where we now and where are we going? In this interactive presentation, Michael shares his visions of the future.

Complementary drinks at Searsons after the talk.

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JAVA Conference in Cork (SS-183)

Date: Wednesday 15th September 2010
Duration: 1.00pm - 5.00pm
Venue: Cork International Airport Hotel , CORK

To register for this event, please email marie@itcork.ie

OVERVIEW

This is the 6th Annual Java @ Cork Conference. See below for the agenda

AGENDA

1:00pm Light Lunch & Registration Desk Opens.

1:30pm "Opening Note" by Stephen Lawlor on behalf of it@cork

1:40pm "The Software ecosystem - how Red Hat can support you on your journey" presented by Ronan Kirby, Red Hat.

2:00pm "Partly Cloudy - The Evolution of MiddleWare" - Mark Little, Senior Director of JBoss Engineering, Red Hat.

Middleware is typically considered to be that software which exists between the operating system and the application and designed to facilitate the development and deployment of said application. As such middleware exists in pretty much every arena with the possible exception of embedded devices. Middleware is part of the Web, resides on your laptop and is even present within your games consoles. The concept of middleware has therefore played a core role in the evolution and success of software for over 4 decades. However, with the advent of Cloud some are talking about the death of middleware. In this presentation we shall show that nothing could be further from the truth and that Cloud is simply another evolution within which middleware will play another key role. We shall look at how what we consider to be Cloud today is also likely to change radically over the coming years, with the concept of the Personal Cloud impacting more heavily on the general populace. We'll also consider how Java, the language and the platform, will play a pivotal role in this evolution of middleware.

3:00pm "Introduction to Intellify - Java API"- James Little, CTO of ThinkSmart Technologies.

We present Intellify a Java API that provides a single modelling layer to various optimisation technologies. Intellify unifies into a single environment various solving technologies such as Constraint Programming,
Mathematical Programming, Business Rules and AI Planning. Often with business problems a single solving approach to a problem is not sufficient. We will present a number of case studies where applying optimisation technologies through Intellify delivered significant results. Intellify is the result of commercialising a three year Enterprise Ireland project at 4C, UCC. Thinksmart Technologies, located in the Western Gateway Building, has recently been spun out of UCC to exploit this technology.

3:30pm Tea/Coffee Break

3:45pm "Developing Applications with Rules, Workflow and Event Processing" - Mark Proctor, Consulting JBoss Engineer, Red Hat.

Rules, Workflow and Event Processing (often referred to as event stream processing or complex event processing) are at the heart of the Business Logic for most enterprises. Each one provides a declarative environment to model business problems, but is limited in the scope and range of problems it can define. Typically an enterprise will source each product from a different vendor and at some level tries to integrate the three. This integration is often very limited and superficial, such as processes only using rules for stateless decision services. This talk gives an introduction into Drools which unifies these concepts with Drools Expert, Fusion, Flow and Guvnor. It will cover what a rule engine is, how it works and how to author rules, what event processing is and how drools was extended for this and our work around BPMN2 integration with Drools.

4:45pm - 5pm Q&A and Close.

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PMP Project Managment Professional Certification (SS-151)

Date: Monday 6th - Thursday 9th December 2010
Duration: 9am - 5pm
Venue: Professional Training Premises, DUBLIN

OVERVIEW

Professionally Certified Project Managers are a benchmark for excellence in terms of performance and productivity in their profession and also bring a repeatable, consistent quality to the projects they manage. Certification gives project managers a competitive edge in job opportunities, promotions and they also retain higher salaries than those without certification.

This course is geared towards achieving PMP certification and includes access to 800 PMP exam questions via a web-based PMP exam simulator. This takes participants from the course right up to the certification exam.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

The syllabus is designed based on the experience level of the participants. Given that this is a highly-focused course aimed towards final exam preparation; participants must already have experience of managing projects and intend to sit the PMP exam.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Upon completion of this course; the participant will

Be prepared to sit the PMP® exam.
Apply approved Project Management principles to their work.
Identify the areas of Project Management they need work experience in.

COURSE CONTENT

• PMI® requirements of candidates
• The application process
• Modules covering all Project Management Knowledge Areas:

Scope

Time

Cost

Quality

HR

Risk

Communications

Procurement

Integration

Ethics

Focus on hot topics.
• Exam makeup & Format.
• Access to 800 PMP exam questions via a web-based PMP exam simulator.

This takes participants from the course right up to certification exam.

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Oracle SQL & PL (SS-189)

Date: Wednesday 3rd - Friday 5th November 2010
Duration: 9.30am - 5.30pm
Venue: DUBLIN

OVERVIEW

In this session, International Oracle author, trainer and expert, Dan Hotka, will illustrate coding techniques that ensure a consistent response time between instances and releases of the Oracle database. He focuses on performance tuning of actual SQL statements, as well as covering a variety of Oracle Server tuning topics. He then moves to advance knowledge of the PL/SQL programming language.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

A working knowledge of SQL and PL/SQL is required. Knowledge of SQL Explain Plans is helpful but not necessary.

COURSE CONTENT
SQL Statement Tuning
- Oracle RDBMS Architecture overview
- Understanding/Reading/Interpreting Explain Plans
- Understanding the Rule-based Optimizer
- Understanding the Cost-based Optimizer
- Working with Hints

SQL Tuning Tools
- Tuning Tool Review: Statspack, Events, Tracing/Tkprof
- Profiling and tuning PL/SQL
- Finding Problem SQL using v$ information

Oracle Architecture:
Introduction to PL/SQL :
-Syntax and language structure review

PL/SQL Topics :
Package Usage (both User Defined and Oracle Defined Packages)
- Profiling/Debugging/Compiling
- Cursor Sharing/Cursor Variables
- Collections
-Dynamic SQL
-Autonomous Transactions
- PL/SQL Coding Tips
- Debugging PL/SQL
- PL/SQL Profiling
- Tracing PL/SQL

Advanced Oracle PL/SQL:

- PL/SQL Overview/Review
- PL/SQL Compiler
- Definer/Invoker Rights
- Executing and Exception handling
- Autonomous Transactions
- Package Options
- Overloading
- Database Triggers
- DML, Instead of, ServerError, Startup, Shutdown, Logon

ABOUT DAN HOTKA

Dan Hotka is a Training Specialist and an Oracle ACE Director who has over 32 years in the computer industry, over 27 years of experience with Oracle products. His experience with the Oracle RDBMS dates back to the Oracle V4.0 days. Dan’s latest book is the Oracle SQL Tuning: A Close Look at Explain Plans by Amazon. He is also the author of TOAD Handbook by Pearson, SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, Oracle9i Development By Example, and Oracle8i from Scratch by Que and has co-authored 7 other popular books including the Database Oracle10g Linux Administration by Oracle Press. He is frequently published in Oracle trade journals, and regularly speaks at Oracle conferences and user groups around the world.

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ISTQB Foundation course in software Testing (SS-179)

Date: Tuesday 9th - Thursday 11th November 2010
Duration: 9.30am - 5.30pm
Venue: Dublin - D4 Berkeley Court Hotel, Lansdowne Road

OVERVIEW

The ISTQB was officially founded as an International Testing Qualifications Board in Edinburgh in November 2002, by members of the ISEB Software testing Board together with representatives from other countries.

The idea and proposal for the ISTQB, stemmed from the original ISEB view of Software Testing and the need for an international Software Testing Qualification. The International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) has been set up to bring together testers from around the world to work on one set of terminology and syllabuses with a view to allow certification in Software Testing to be internationally recognised and coordinated.
It is the ISTQB's role to support a single, universally accepted, international qualification scheme, aimed at software and system testing professionals.
The ISTQB Foundation certificate is awarded to all those who successfully complete a one-hour, multiple choice examination. The examination is externally set and invigilated by ISEB.

The ISTQB Foundation course in Software Testing - 3-day training course.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

Quality analysts, testers, developers, systems analysts, project leaders, users and data administrators.
No specific prerequisites are assumed. Attendees are expected to be ‘software knowledgeable’ with some minimal test of software experience.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Those attending the course will learn:
•    The fundamental principles of Software Testing
•    How testing fits into the development lifecycle
•    The importance of test process, objectives, techniques and tools
•    Essential functional and non-functional test methods
•    Basic test design and measurement techniques
•    Fundamental test management principles
•    How to select and implement tools effectively

COURSE CONTENT

Introduction

Fundamentals of Testing
Why is testing necessary?
What is testing?
General testing principles
Fundamental test process
The psychology of testing

Part Two: Testing through the lifecycle

Software development models
Test levels
Test types – the targets of testing
Maintenance testing

Part Three: Static Reviews

Reviews and the test process
Review process
Static analysis by tools

Part Four: Test design techniques

Identifying test conditions and designing test cases
Categories of test design techniques
Specification-based or black-box techniques
Structure-based or white-box techniques
Experience-based techniques e.g. exploratory testing

Part Five: Test Management

Test Organisation
Test planning and estimation
Test process monitoring and control
Configuration Management
Risk and Testing
Incident Management

Part Six: Tool Support for Testing

Types of test tool
Effective use of tools: potential benefits and risks
Introduction of a tool into an organisation

EXAMINATION COACHING

ISTQB examination - Externally invigilated by ISTB

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ISTQB Advanced Test Analyst Certification (SS-181)

Date: Monday 1st - Friday 5th November 2010 (Examination Date: 10th November)
Duration: 9.30am - 5.30pm

OVERVIEW

Following on from the ISTQB Foundation Certificate, the Advanced Test Analyst Certificate provides the next level of knowledge and practical expertise in the ISTQB Advanced Certification scheme. It is one of three certified courses at Advanced level (the other two being Advanced Test Manager and Advanced Technical Test Analyst).
The 5 day tutor led course has been designed to enable participants understand, apply and analyse key testing principles and processes.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

This course is aimed at testing practitioners already working in the area of test design, analysis, specification and implementation. This includes quality analysts, testers, developers, systems analysts, project leaders, users and data administrators.
Successful completion of the ISTQB Foundation Certificate is a pre-requisite to taking the ISTQB Advanced Certificate examination.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Those attending the course will learn:
•    Structure the tasks defined in the test strategy in terms of business domain requirements
•    Analyze the system in sufficient detail to meet the user quality expectations
•    Evaluate the system requirements to determine domain validity
•    Prepare and execute the adequate testing activities, and report on their progress
•    Provide the necessary evidence to support evaluations
•    Implement the necessary tools and techniques to achieve the defined goals

COURSE CONTENT

1.    Introduction to Test Analyst Syllabus
2.    Basic Aspects of Software Testing
3.    Testing Processes
       •    Test Analysis & Evaluation
       •    Test Implementation & Execution
       •    Evaluation of Exit Criteria and Reporting
4.    Test Management
       •    Risk Based Testing
5.    Test Techniques
       •    Specification based
       •    Defect & Experience based
6.    Test of Software Characteristics
       •    Quality Attributes for Domain Testing
       •    Quality Attributes for Technical Testing
7.    Reviews
8.    Incident Management
9.    Test Tools & Automation
       •    Test Tool Concepts
       •    Test Tool Categories
10.    People Skill Team Composition
       •    Communication

Course Timetable
Day 1:
Introduction to Test Analyst Syllabus
Basic Aspects of Software Testing
Testing Processes
Test Management
Day 2-4:
Test Techniques
Test of Software Characteristics
Day 5:
Reviews
Incident Management
Test Tools & Automation
People Skills - Team Composition

Handout Materials
Presentation Slides
Syllabus
Glossary
Exercises and model answers
Sample Exam Paper and Answers

CERTIFICATION & REFERENCE MATERIAL

Certification
Standard ISTQB Examination

Reference Material
ISTQB Syllabus
ISTQB Glossary
The full Syllabus and Glossary can be downloaded from the ISTQB website: www.istqb.org. All references can be found in the syllabus. See also www.istb.ie for information on the Irish National Board.

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ISTQB Advanced Test Manager Certification (SS-182)

Date: Monday 22nd - Friday 25th November 2010 (Examination Date: 2nd December)
Duration: 9.30am - 5.30pm
Venue: Dublin

OVERVIEW

Following on from the ISTQB Foundation Certificate, the Advanced Test Manager Certificate provides the next level of knowledge and practical expertise in the ISTQB Advanced Certification scheme. It is one of three certified courses at Advanced level (the other two being Advanced Test Analyst and Advanced Technical Test Analyst).
The 5 day tutor led course has been designed to enable participants understand, apply and analyse key testing principles and processes.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

This course is aimed at testing practitioners, responsible for organising and improving the testing process, i.e. project managers, project leaders, test managers, test team leaders, senior test personnel and test analysts.
Successful completion of the ISTQB Foundation Certificate is a pre-requisite to taking the ISTQB Advanced Certificate examination.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Upon completion of this course you will be able to:
•   Define the overall testing goals and strategy for the systems being tested.
•   Plan, schedule and track the tasks
•   Describe and organize the necessary activities
•   Select, acquire and assign the adequate resources to the tasks.
•   Select, organize and lead testing teams
•   Organise the communication between the members of the testing teams, and between the testing teams and all other stakeholders.
•   Justify the decisions and provide adequate reporting information where applicable.

COURSE CONTENT

Introduction

Basic aspects of software testing
         Testing in the software lifecycle
         Specific systems (systems of systems, safety critical etc.)
         Metrics & measurement

Testing Processes
        Test planning & Control
        Test Implementation & Execution
        Evaluating exit criteria & execution
        Test Closure Activities

Test Management
        Test Management Documentation
        Test Plan Documentation
        Test Estimation
        Scheduling Test Planning
        Test Process Monitoring & Control
        Business value of Testing
        Distributed, outsourced and in sourced Testing
        Risk-based testing
            Introduction
            Risk Management
            Risk Management in the lifecycle
        Failure modes and effects analysis
        Test Management Issues

Reviews
        Principles of Reviews
        Introducing Reviews
        Success factors for Reviews

Incident Management

Standards & Test Improvement Process
        Improving the Test Process

Test Tool Automation
        Test tool Concepts
        Test Tool Categories

People Skills
        Individual Skills
        Test Team Dynamics
        Fitting Testing within an organization
        Motivation
        Communication

Course Timetable

Day 1:
Introduction to Test Manager Syllabus
Basic Aspects of Software Testing
Testing Processes
Standards and Test Improvement Process
Day 2-4:
Test Management
Reviews
Day 5:
Incident Management
Test Tools & Automation
People Skills - Team Composition

Handout Materials
Presentation Slides
Syllabus
Glossary
Exercises and model answers
Sample Exam Paper and Answers

CERTIFICATION & REFERENCE MATERIAL

Certification
Standard ISTQB Examination

Reference Material
ISTQB Syllabus
ISTQB Glossary
The full Syllabus and Glossary can be downloaded from the ISTQB website: www.istqb.org. All references can be found in the syllabus.

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Cucumber for web testing by Gojko Adzic and David de Florinier (SS-190)

Date: 21st October 2010
Duration: 6.30pm
Venue: IBEC, 84/86 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin
FREE TO ALL MEMBERS

To register for this event, please email susan@isa-skillnet.com with your name and job title.

OVERVIEW

Gojko Adzic and David de Florinier demonstrate why Cucumber (an opensource test automation tool) is a great tool to specify and test web applications. We'll briefly go over the basics of Cucumber and then show how it allows developers and testers to create an efficient UI test automation framework. We'll discuss how the Cucumber step model fits into the three layers of UI automation and how it integrates with the most popular web automation tools.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

This talk is open to everyone, software testers, test managers and developers .

BIOGRAPHIES

Gojko Adzic is a software craftsman with a passion for new technologies, programming and writing. Gojko got bitten by the specification-by-example bug five years ago. Since then, he has helped numerous teams implement these practices, written two books on the subject (Test Driven .NET Development with FitNesse and Bridging the Communication Gap) and contributed to several opensource projects for specification by example. At the moment, Gojko is working on his third book, titled Specification by Example.

Gojko is a frequent speaker at leading software development and testing conferences and runs the UK agile testing user group.

Over the last eleven years, he has worked as a developer, architect, technical director and consultant on projects delivering equity and energy trading, mobile positioning, e-commerce, online gaming and complex configuration management.

David de Florinier is a programmer based in Essex and London. During the last 12 years he has worked on... projects for clients in Government, Insurance Broking, Public Transport, Sports Betting and Online Gaming.

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Oracle SQL Tuning (SS-176)

Date: Thursday 11th & Friday 12th November 2010
Duration: 9.30am - 5.30pm
Venue: Cork

OVERVIEW

On a welcome return to Cork following his two sold-out sessions last year, International Oracle author, trainer and expert, Dan Hotka, will illustrate coding techniques that ensure a consistent response time between instances and releases of the Oracle database. He focuses on performance tuning of actual SQL statements, as well as covering a variety of Oracle Server tuning topics.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

This programme is perfect for developers who need to know more on how Oracle works and how to get their SQL to perform better. It is also good for those who have limited exposure to SQL tuning or perhaps are new to the Oracle RDBMS.

PREREQUISITES

A working knowledge of the SQL language. Knowledge of SQL Explain Plans is helpful but not necessary.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Participants will have the opportunity to ask the tough Oracle questions and a handson opportunity to learn more about Oracle, TOAD and/or SQL Developer.

They will learn:
How Oracle arrives at an Execution Plan
In-depth look at Explain Plans
Index Review/Index Internals
SQL Trace/Stats Pack
PL/SQL Tuning/Profiling
SQL problem-solving topics using V$ Table information
Lectures and topics are enhanced with live illustrations and hands-on exercises

ATTENDEES RECEIVE

Study guide with presentations and relevant white papers
Course files full of tuning and problem discovery scripts
Opportunity to ask the tough Oracle questions
A hands-on opportunity to learn more about Oracle, TOAD and/or SQL Developer

COURSE CONTENT

The course starts out with a complete overview of the Oracle architecture, so students can get an understanding how their SQL and applications can take advantage of the computing environment. It then moves to a discussion on the differences of the various Explain Plan steps such as Merge-Join and Nested-Loop, and when is it best to use each. Dan goes into considerable detail, with SQL examples, on how the optimizers (both rule and cost) make their decisions. Participants will work with a variety of SQL statements, reviewing explain plans and making changes to make these SQL statements perform better. They will also experience how to monitor their application environment, and see how to find problem SQL in their applications.

This workshop includes a section on monitoring Oracle RDBMS and SQL via the v$ tables and TOAD and is packed full of scripts to discover a variety of issues.

The course utilizes a variety of current tools. Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about TOAD and SQL Developer, as well as the Oracle tools like SQL*Plus, TKProf, and Stats Pack.

Summary Course Outline:
SQL Statement Tuning
- Oracle RDBMS Architecture overview
- Understanding/Reading/Interpreting Explain Plans
- Understanding the Rule-based Optimizer
- Understanding the Cost-based Optimizer
- Working with Hints

SQL Tuning Tools
- Tuning Tool Review: Statspack, Events, Tracing/Tkprof
- Profiling and tuning PL/SQL
- Finding Problem SQL using v$ information

ABOUT DAN HOTKA

Dan Hotka is a Training Specialist who has over 31 years in the computer industry and over 26 years of experience with Oracle products. He is an internationally recognized Oracle expert with Oracle experience dating back to the Oracle V4.0 days. Dan’s latest book is the TOAD Handbook by Pearson. He is also the author of SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, Oracle9i Development By Example, and Oracle8i from Scratch by Que and has co-authored 7 other popular books including the Database Oracle10g Linux Administration by Oracle Press. He is frequently published in Oracle trade journals, and regularly speaks at Oracle conferences and user groups around the world.

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Introducing Visual Studio 2010 for Testers - WEBINAR (SS-155)

Date: Monday 20th December 2010
Duration: 12.30 - 1.15pm
Venue: Online

OVERVIEW

In April 2010 Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 including a game-changing addition to bring development and testing closer together. In this one hour webinar Allan Tong will give an overview of some of the key features of this exciting new toolset.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

This course is ideal for testers.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Those attending the course will learn:
• Exciting new toolsets.

COURSE CONTENT

-Test Case Management
Microsoft Test Manager provides the means to start designing and implementing test cases to minimise the long term manual maintenance which is typically experienced in most other test management tools. This process further aligns the manual test cases to be used in parallel with automation, without usual redesign by test automation specialists.

- Test Planning
A dashboard interface provides a quick reference to the current status. It further enables team leaders or managers to do forward planning, execution assignment, derivation of number of test cases based on combinations of operating systems, etc. Test suite management per phase of testing can also be defined.

- Test Execution
The test runner makes the execution on local, remote or virtual platforms transparent. The runner has the ability to record the users actions and replay these against the application with minimal amendments. The runner is also capable of logging a vast amount debug information for the developers to be used for analysis.

- Test Reporting
Test manager provides a host of output formats from built-in dashboards, to Microsoft Excel and SharePoint.

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UPK Professional 6.1 Accelerated Workshop (SS-166)

Date: Monday 22nd November - Friday 26th November 2010
Duration: 9.30am - 5.30pm
Venue: RR Donnelly Premises, Cork

OVERVIEW

On completion of this Workshop Delegates will have an in-depth understanding of features and functions of of UPK Professional, an Oracle product which comprises of both UPK and Knowledge Pathways. Throughout the Workshop, the Instructor will facilitate understanding by encouraging discussions a variety of development considerations, sharing the knowledge gained during their own experience as a Lead Developer on a number of UPK Professional development projects.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

This course is designed for Course authors, instructional designers and subject matter experts responsible for creating training or reviewing business processes, user testing scripts or training materials.

REQUIREMENTS

Participants should have a basic knowledge of Windows and the target applications.

COURSE CONTENT

User Productivity Kit

Build Outlines
Alternative Actions, Paths and Decision Frames
Record and Edit Topics
Define Roles and Keywords
Manipulating Text and using Frame Properties
Reuse Documents with Paste and Paste Special
Manage the Library
Publish Content for Player and Printed Output
Related Documents and Document Properties
Export and Import Content
Create and Link Attachments
Check In and Check Out of the Server
Glossaries
Working in a Multi User Environment
String Input Options
Customize Templates
Developer in Multi User Environment
Author and Content Administration
Sound Recorder and Editor
Localize Content (Translation)
Create and Manage Login Profiles
In Application Support
Using Tracking

Knowledge Pathways

Work with New Titles
Add Content
Key Words, Metadata and Spellcheck
Import Content
HTML Editor
Create, Edit, Preview and Delete Questions
Assessments and Knowledge Checks
Managing Titles
Knowledge Path types and use of the same
Remediation, Personal Courses, Root Activity Options
Managing Workgroups, User Groups and Users
Expert Advice Options
Using the Title Manager
User Reports including customisation

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Programming in Python (SS-177)

Date: Monday 1st November - Wednesday 3rd November 2010
Duration: 9.30am - 5.30pm
Venue: Transaction Network Services, EastPoint Business Park, Dublin

OVERVIEW

Python is powerful, portable, object- oriented open source programming language for writing stand alone programs, quick scripts, and prototypes for large applications.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

This course starts at the fundamentals of Python - statements, variables, comments, conditionals and loops then goes on to study Python's collections - Lists, Tuples and Dictionaries. Functions, modules and packages are then covered, as is the use of and creation of data types (objects) in Python.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Object oriented principles and capabilities are built in to the Python language, and the course discusses how these can be exploited most effectively.
After coverage of the fundamentals of the language as described above, the course can be extended to cover specific more advanced libraries, such as Twisted for network programming, SQLAlchemy for database access and Stackless for concurrent programming.

PREREQUISITES

Prior programming experience in another language such as Perl, Java, Basic or C.

COURSE CONTENT

•    Basic language principles;
•    Execution models, the Python interpreter and IDE support;
•    Basic types and control flow;
•    Defining and using functions;
•    Operating on files – input and output;
•    Analysing text with regular expressions;
•    Data structures – lists, tuples and dictionaries;
•    Defining and using modules;
•    Classes and objects.

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Advanced Use Case Modelling & Design (SS-195)

Date: Monday 20th - Tuesday 21st December 2010
Duration: 9.30am - 5.00pm
Venue: Dublin - Exact location to be confirmed

OVERVIEW

This programme presents the concepts and techniques necessary to effectively use system requirements, captured using use cases, to drive the development of a robust design model.

In this intensive, hands-on workshop, participants learn to apply the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and fundamental object-oriented analysis and design concepts using the core UML diagrams
•    Use Case
•    Activity
•    Sequence
•    Collaboration
•    Class
•    State

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

This workshop is intended for practitioners who desire an understanding of object-oriented analysis and design concepts using UML, as well as hands-on practical experience applying the techniques. This includes analysts, designers, and software developers.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Upon completion of the workshop, participants will be able to:
•   Apply a use case-driven, architecture-centric process to the development of a robust design model.
•   Use the UML to represent the design model.
•   Apply the concepts of abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism.
•   Understand the different views of a software architecture, the key mechanisms that are defined in support of that architecture, and the effect of the architecture and mechanisms on the produced design.
•   Describe some basic design considerations, including the use of patterns

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Materials Provided:
Upon attending the UCDD/UML workshop, each student will receive the following:
• Student Manual
• Sample Requirements documentation, if required

Structure & Layout:
Lecture & Exercises.
The workshop is paper based and delivered independently of any CASE tool.
Sample Project:
The workshop comes with a set of sample Requirements, in Use-Case format, which can be used as the basis for the hands-on exercises.

Note:
If a customer has their own project that they wish to use for the exercises, this can be agreed beforehand.

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PMP Project Managment Professional Certification (SS-151b)

Date: Monday 6th - Thursday 9th December 2010
Duration: 9am - 5pm
Venue: DUBLIN

OVERVIEW

Professionally Certified Project Managers are a benchmark for excellence in terms of performance and productivity in their profession and also bring a repeatable, consistent quality to the projects they manage. Certification gives project managers a competitive edge in job opportunities, promotions and they also retain higher salaries than those without certification.

This course is geared towards achieving PMP certification and includes access to 800 PMP exam questions via a web-based PMP exam simulator. This takes participants from the course right up to the certification exam.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

The syllabus is designed based on the experience level of the participants. Given that this is a highly-focused course aimed towards final exam preparation; participants must already have experience of managing projects and intend to sit the PMP exam.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Upon completion of this course; the participant will

Be prepared to sit the PMP® exam.
Apply approved Project Management principles to their work.
Identify the areas of Project Management they need work experience in.

COURSE CONTENT

• PMI® requirements of candidates
• The application process
• Modules covering all Project Management Knowledge Areas:

Scope

Time

Cost

Quality

HR

Risk

Communications

Procurement

Integration

Ethics

Focus on hot topics.
• Exam makeup & Format.
• Access to 800 PMP exam questions via a web-based PMP exam simulator.

This takes participants from the course right up to certification exam. Participants must register and pay for exams themselves. The exam fee is not included in the course fee quoted above.

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Certified ScrumMaster Training (Course Ref SS194)

Date: Thursday 4th & Friday 5th November 2010
Venue: Letterkenny
Times: 9.30am - 5.00pm

Overview
Leading a Scrum team is radically different to traditional project management. Rather than plan, instruct, and direct, the leader of a Scrum team (called a ScrumMaster) facilitates, coaches, and leads. In this ScrumMaster Certification course, you will learn the essentials of working as a ScrumMaster or Scrum team member. You will learn how to assume the responsibilities of a ScrumMaster and to guide the development team, a project, or an organisation into Agile practice by fostering the adoption of new attitudes, collaborative processes and working to remove institutional barriers.

While the Scrum Alliance provides a list of core concepts that must be covered in the class, each instructor creates his or her own material, allowing courses to differ based on the strengths, interests, and experiences of the instructor. Martine's interest, research and experience has focused on planning and estimation techniques and as such this ScrumMaster Certification course covers Agile Estimation and Planning techniques in particular depth.

Upon completion of this ScrumMaster course, you will know how to use Scrum to maximise value creation, improve customer and employee satisfaction as well as engineering practices and tools. Additionally, upon successful completion of the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year Scrum Alliance membership, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information is available..

Objectives

Assume the responsibilities of a ScrumMaster
Remove the barriers between development and the customer so that the customer/Product Owner directly drives development
Improve employee and customer satisfaction
Improve accuracy of estimation and planning
Improve the engineering practices and tools so each increment of functionality is potentially shippable

Format

The course blends tutorial, class discussion, question and answer sessions, and demonstrations/simulations.

Introduction

Agile Values and Scrum Origins
Scrum and Change
Empirical Process Control
Companies Using Scrum

Scrum Process and Roles

Scrum Flow, Iterative-incremental Software Development and Shippable Product Increments
The Role of the Product Owner
The Role of the Team including Team Dynamics, Team Norms and the Visual Workplace
The ScrumMaster Role including Conflict Management, Appraisals and Appointing the ScrumMaster
The Role of Project Managers and Functional Managers in Scrum

Requirements Management

Software Overproduction
The Product Backlog
Prioritisation Techniques

Release Management

Sustainable Pace
Estimating and Planning
Tracking

Working with Sprints

Sprint Workflow and Characteristics
Sprint Planning Preparation
Sprint Estimating and Planning
Daily Scrum
Sprint Review and Retrospective
Sprint Reporting

Large and Distributed Scrum Projects

Brook’s Law
Organic Growth and Conway’s Law
Master Product Backlog and the Product Owner Team
Team Set-up
Multi-team Planning and Coordination
Shared Norms and Assets
Distributed Scrum Project Tips
Sample Distributed Project Org

Getting Started in Scrum

Just Do It
The Nature of Change
Scrum Adoption Stages
Change Practices including the Enterprise Transition Team and the Transition Product Backlog
Deming’s PDCA Cycle
The Role of Consultants

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Subversion Workshop (SS-165)

Date: Tuesday 9th November 2010
Durtion: 9.30am – 5.00pm
Venue: Houghton Miflin Harcourt, Tara Street, Dublin 2
Cost to Non-members: €330
Cost to Software Skillnet members after grant aid subsidy: €230

OVERVIEW

The Subversion workshop is part of the Neueda Workshop Series and provides an overview of the concepts of Subversion and an understanding of how to use Subversion to provide version control for day-to-day software development activities, it takes an in-depth look at some of the more advanced aspects of the working copy, also looking at branching and merging tools and strategies in Subversion.

This is a hands-on practical workshop with at least 50% of the time spent on exercises.

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

The course is aimed at software development, quality assurance and technical writing teams that need to manage their source code.

COURSE CONTENT

User Topics [main content]
1. Introduction
2. Architecture   - revisions, working copy, repo layout
3. Working Cycle (single person)   - checkout, add, move, edit/compare, commit
4. Working Cycle (teamwork)   - update, conflicts
5. Locking   - explicit locking, needs-lock
6. SVN Properties - eg ignore, keywords, externals
7. Managing Versions   - tagging, branching, switching branches
8. Branching Strategies   - why needed; developer, feature, platform, vendor; reintegrate, cherry picking, ignore ancestry, tree conflicts
9. Merging - merge, reintegrate, svn log
10. Configuration - auto-properties, global-ignore, commit-times

Admin Topics
1. Introduction
2. Installation - svnserve, authentication, apache
3. Handling - creating a repo, logging, lock
4. Advanced Handling - svndumpfilter, commit hooks, lock/unlock hooks, svnsync
5. Maintenance - hotcopy, check integrity, dump, create

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Product Management/Successful Software Commercialisation (SS-197)

Location: Clontarf Castle, Dublin
Dates: Wednesday 1st and Thursday 2nd December

WHO IS THIS COURSE SUITABLE FOR

Those in the Technology Sector who are new product managers, practicing product managers, seeking a refresher course or programme/ project management, engineering and marketing managers or staff that share duties or collaborate with product management

COURSE CONTENT