Major UK software company undergoes continuous integration course as part of line of software engineering excellence programme

A major UK software company has taken a continuous integration training course as part of a line of S/W Engineering Excellence courses developed especially for the businesses audience in order to promote consistent and “good practice” skills within the Developer community. All Topics were delivered via a 1 day workshops and other courses include non-functional requirements, meaningful code reviews and secure coding. The topics are part of a set of competencies from the software engineering good practice programme.  Code review and the continuous processes are also part of XP (eXtreme Programming), one of the Agile methodologies.  Code review (AKA Peer Review) is also part of a comprehensive set of Quality Testing Techniques.

Secure Coding and Testing (2 days) was part of the Application Security programme developed for the audience as a result of a real need which had arisen within the business and demonstrated through increased attacks and a general acceptance that AppSec skills were a necessary and good skills for a modern Developer to possess.

The Software Engineering sessions are hands-off and it is the enthusiasm of the instructor for the topics and the embedded practical work that brings to life the subject. The opportunity for the attendees to have their own work reviewed is also a positive option for those brave enough to take that chance.

The Continuous Processes course started by just covering Continuous Integration, but with the growing popularity of Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment it was necessary to add additional information to the course to stay up to date. Continuous integration automates the integration of code changes from multiple contributors into a single project, allowing a repository where builds and tests run. Continuous delivery follows and is responsible for packaging an artefact to be delivered to end-users. Finally, deployment occurs where the artefact is automatically launched and distributed.

The course developed specifically for the business ran through similar content to the public courses but included dedicated examples, exercises and workshop. The course objectives were as follows:

• Introduction to Continuous integrations process to build an understanding
• Further in depth engagement in each step of the process and a workshop to utilise this information
• Potential pitfalls of continuous integration and how to escape them
• Using testing protocols in tandem with continuous integrations such as TDD and BDD.

There were around 5 delegates on this section of the course and the feedback received about the course content and instructor were excellent.

“The most important aspect is getting everyone on the same page - CI/CD at a high level - but it's not until you dig deeper into the concepts and details you discover what needs to be worked on as an organization. And your speed & cadence on the course delivery, handling Q&A's belay experience and patience of having dealt with this across multiple teams of all sizes. This is something we needed - thank you.” LW, Senior Product manager

“The instructor was very thorough and made things easy to understand.” KC, Software engineering 

For further information on this course and other Software engineering courses:

Continuous integration training course

Software engineering excellence training course

Non-Functional Requirements training course

Code reviews training course

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