We’re often asked by companies about how they can get the most value from Agile/Scrum practices. More specifically, they want to know if they are being as effective as best they possibly can be by using the Scrum framework for their explicit needs.

The other objective for individuals is determining if it necessary to be certified in order to be effective in the Agile Scrum world?   In short, a good Scrum Master must understand four things: the business they work in, the technology they work with, the Agile and Scrum principles, and, most importantly, people!  Based on these facts, Scrum Master Certification is not enough – real life experience and a bit of soft skills should be part and parcel of their training. For organizations, the main goal is to understand industry best practices when adopting and applying agile principles, to build strong teams, understand and distill business needs into software requirements.

In terms of getting a good grip on training for Agile/Scrum, one can opt to pursue a certification in Scrum (CSM) Certified Scrum Master for personal reasons or for a job requirement. Or, one can simply opt to learn the benefits and pitfalls of the methodology and decide the best approach for them.

There are different ways to get started with Agile training. Below are two of the most common paths to Agile our students take.

With the skyrocketing popularity of Android and iOS operating systems, software developers got a whole new arena opened up. Many of the programmers have progressed to concentrate solely onto Mobile Technology Development. This is mainly due to the high demand as well as numerous lucrative ideas left to explore in the Mobile App world.

Exponential growth of smartphone users

As per the survey by eMarketer, the number of smartphone users across the globe crossed 1 billion almost two years ago. The expected number of smartphone users by 2014 end is 1.75 billion.

With smartphones, iPads and Tablets getting more accessible and less expensive day by day, the development potential for mobile apps is truly vast. The under-penetration in emerging markets like India and China in Asia shows that there seems to still a lot of steam left in the mobile app development industry.

I suspect that many of you are familiar with the term "hard coding a value" whereby the age of an individual or their location is written into the condition (or action) of a business rule (in this case) as shown below:

if customer.age > 21 and customer.city == 'denver'

then ...

Such coding practices are perfectly expectable provided that the conditional values, age and city, never change. They become entirely unacceptable if a need for different values could be anticipated. A classic example of where this practice occurred that caused considerable heartache in the IT industry was the Y2K issue where dates were updated using only the last 2 digits of a four digit number because the first 2 digits were hard-coded to 19 i.e. 1998, 1999. All was well provided that the date did not advance to a time beyond the 1900’s since no one could be certain of what would happen when the millennia arrived (2000). A considerably amount of work (albeit boring) and money, approximately $200 billion, went into revising systems by way of software rewrites and computer chip replacements in order to thwart any detrimental outcomes. It is obvious how a simple change or an assumption can have sweeping consequences.

You may wonder what Y2K has to do with Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS). Well, what if we considered rules themselves to be hard-coded. If we were to write 100s of rules in Java, .NET or whatever language that only worked for a given scenario or assumption, would that not constitute hard-coded logic? By hard-coded, we obviously mean compiled. For example, if a credit card company has a variety of bonus campaigns, each with their own unique list of rules that may change within a week’s time, what would be the most effective way of writing software to deal with these responsibilities?