Individual Training

How do you get people up to speed really quickly on a project? We have 26 developers on our project 8 of whom are absolutely new. How do we train them?

We offered our people (new and old) a range of training opportunities.

• A couple of courses on the business
• A bunch of courses on the app
• Browsing Code Alone
• Fixing bugs Alone
• Pairing with a Newbie on a story
• Pairing with a Senior on a Story
• Pairing with a Senior on a refactoring
• Pairing with Newbie on bugs
• Working in a larger group to implement a story with Senior direction.

Which one got chosen? Well everyone had a different answer. Each chose a different combination. The best choice for training is to let the trainee tell you what they need.

Interestingly they all accepted the courses designed to describe the business and the implementations. There were 6 of them (1-2 hours each, 2/day).

Thanks to Colin Cassie for encouraging this direction.