Declan Whelan

I am an active software developer and agile coach. I am also a professional engineer with twenty-five years of experience in a wide range of software industries including the financial, medical, educational, and manufacturing sectors. I have started three technology companies and have consulted with many other technology organizations in Canada.

My most recent start-up was Innovasys, a software company that developed electronic imaging and workflow products for the financial market. I was co-founder, CTO and Chief Architect. Together with my partners, we successfully transitioned the company from a start-up through to profitable venture and eventual sale.

I am a certified Scrum Master and a member of the IEEE Computer Society, Agile Alliance, and Scrum Alliance.

My focus is on working in the trenches with teams to deliver better software value, quality, and time-to-market through agile principles and practices.

Coaching

Agile training is important to get a new agile team started and getting the entire team on the same page. But the real challenge for most teams is transferring this new-found knowledge effectively into their real-world projects. Many situational factors come into play and it is easy for teams to backslide into traditional principles and practices.

Effective coaching can pull your team quickly through the forming, storming, and norming phases to become a high performing team.

I believe in coaching by doing. I will plan, design, code, test, write and participate as a generalist on your team.

It takes courage, vision, leadership, deep technical skills and teamwork to become a high-performing agile team. And the largest single success factor for adopting agility is having an experienced agile practitioner. I can be that person on your team.

Training

Is your team new to agile? Are you finding it difficult to make the transition to agility? I can help through agile training courses tailored to your people, processes and product. I will meet with your management team and team members to better understand the challenges you face and what you plan to achieve with an agile process. I will then deliver a hands-on training course in your facilities. Typical courses run from one day to a week.

Agile Team Immersion

The best way for a team to learn agility is through total immersion. This allows the entire team to learn together in a realistic situation providing a deep learning experience that sticks.

This three to five day course is a hands-on immersion in an agile environment. We start with an introduction to agile values, principles and values. We then jump quickly into developing a project charter and a release plan.

Each day is an iteration and starts with an iteration planning session. This is followed by three 90 minute development sessions with each session mirroring a typical day. Core agile practices followed include:

• Story writing and estimation
• Task planning and estimation
• Story tests
• Simple design
• Test driven development & refactoring
• Continuous integration
• Pairing

A business context and a small but functional code base with source, automated unit tests & story tests and build scripts is provided. This allows the team to quickly grasp the business value proposition, learn the code and start developing immediately.

The training is suitable for teams of 4 to 12 team members including product owners, developers, testers, technical writers, project managers and UX designers.

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