Mentoring

A critical step of the training and education process is to provide hands-on experience .  When the initial training is complete your staff is ready to begin applying their new skills.  It is at this point that many organizations run into trouble because they mistakenly believe that their staff now has the skills necessary build modern software on their own.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Would you send somebody to a couple of accounting courses and give them control of your organization’s finances?  Would you send somebody to a couple of marketing courses and put them in charge of your advertising campaign?  Would you somebody to a couple of law courses and then have them defend you in court?  Of course not.  Therefore, why would you send somebody to a couple of development courses and expect them to develop mission-critical software with their newfound skills?  The bottom line is that a couple of weeks of training is only a couple of weeks of training.   

Our experience is that the mentoring effort should be performed on a development project, one in which the trainee is given the opportunity to apply and evolve the skills that they received during training. Mentors  should participate as active members of your project team, not just as teachers.  For a mentor to be a productive member of the team you will need a ratio of one mentor for every two or three novices, anything more and the mentor will be too busy mentoring to get anything done on your project.  There is nothing wrong with this, as long as there are other experienced people available to develop the complex portions of your application.  Project teams consisting of one expert and a large number of novices are likely to fail. 

Ronin mentors are senior developers experienced in object and Java technologies as well as agile software development techniques.  They can guide your developers through the learning process, showing them how to use modern development techniques.  Contact us for more information.

Software Development Services

Ronin consultants are senior-level software developers that are proficient both at the technologies that they use as well as at advances software development techniques.  In fact, Ronin International is at the leading edge software methodologies, being the source of the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP), Agile Modeling (AM), and the Agile Data (AD) method.  It is our focus on effective software processes that enable us to successfully provide your organization with senior consultants with experience in:

1. Project Management.  Ronin consultants can help your project planning efforts, your people management efforts, to perform a feasibility analysis, to help you to define and recruit your project team, and to perform a project assessment. We can also help your to define configuration management processes and change control processes, as well as help you to improve your reuse management efforts.
2. Requirements Engineering.  You need to define what it is you are going to build before you can build it. In other words, you need a defined set of requirements. Ronin consultants are experienced with use cases, change cases, user interface prototyping, technical requirements engineering, CRC cards, and other common requirements techniques.
3. Modeling.  You have a wide range of modeling techniques to choose from, including but not limited to the techniques of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). When should you apply use case modeling? Is use case modeling sufficient for your needs? How do you go from use cases to class models to source code? How does component modeling fit in? How do you effectively include data/persistence modeling into your overall process? Ronin consultants can help you to determine answers to these questions that meet your specific needs, and help your organization to be successful at object-oriented analysis and design (OOA&D), component-based modeling, and Agile Modeling (AM).  To get a feel for the complexity of modeling in a modern environment, read the Ronin International whitepaper The Object Primer -- An Introduction to Techniques for Agile Modeling.
4. Implementation.  Ronin consultants can help your project teams to successfully implement software using Java technologies such as Java Beans, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), agent technology, and 100% pure Java. Practice shows that the most effective project teams include one or more senior developers that share their expertise with mid-level and novice developers, enabling the team to develop robust software faster and more reliably. Let us help you to succeed.
5. Testing.  You use object-oriented and component-based development techniques to develop complex software, software that by it's very nature must be more difficult to test because of its greater complexity. Unfortunately object-oriented testing is all but ignored in favor of platitudes and misconceptions. Ronin International recognizes that software testing is a difficult but crucial aspect of the software process and our consultants can help to make you successful.
6. Deployment.  It isn't enough to develop good software, you also need to get it into the hands of your users. Ronin consultants can aid in your release/deployment planning, configuration management, change control, support planning, and operations planning efforts.