Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Architect's Training Course

I'm happy to report that we're on our fifth day of our "Architect's Training Course" which we're giving to thirteen senior developers of Pointwest Technologies. The objective of the course is to help turn senior developers into software architects. Below is an outline of the course:
  • Overviews of RUP, Extreme Programming, and the role of the software architect.
  • Code Smells, Refactoring, Object-Oriented Design topics (such as the Law of Demeter) and the GoF Design Patterns
  • Test-Driven Development and JUnit
  • Enterprise Testing Tools
    • JWebUnit, dbUnit, jMock
  • Enterprise Application Patterns (3 days, mainly based on Martin Fowler's book but with other patterns as well. AppFuse will be used to demonstrate some of the patterns.)
  • Survey of various Java technologies
  • Comprehensive exam
  • Case presentations!
    • The students will be given real RFPs and they will have to create and architectural design. Then they will have to defend their design to a panel of architects. There will be three case presentations.
We've been distributing feedback forms daily and so far we've been getting high marks from our students. We've also been giving quizzes and graded recitations daily, and the generally good marks on those show that the concepts have been sticking.

I'm trying to think of a better name for the course. Originally, we were planning to name it "The Architect's Boot Camp" but I don't feel it's precise because the course isn't in one contiguous block of time (the lectures are twice a week and the cases will be once a week). "Architect's Training Course" seems kind of bland. How about "The Architect's Development Course"?

3 comments:

  1. Wow, this looks great!

    I should definitely go sit in some time.

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  2. yeah same here =p

    - paolo m

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  3. ..hmm, i'm kindda confused. Martin from Orange is training pips at PWest? does this mean PW, somewhat outsourced their training to Orange(or something like that)? =)

    /jonel

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