We offer over a dozen development and agile-related training courses, delivered on site for your convenience at competitive rates. Our classes are taught by real practitioners with hardcore, extensive development-team experience. Our students leave the classroom jazzed and ready to apply their newfound knowledge.

We're also available to follow up, and ensure firsthand that students retain and ingrain the new skills through hands-on consulting by recognized industry experts. Jeff Langr and his partners are veterans of the agile community; Jeff has worked to help teams understand and succeed at agile since 2000.

As developers, we've been able to consistently deliver high-quality software. We've helped teach and mentor hundreds of developers how to do the same. We've written highly acclaimed books and one hundred articles on agile, TDD, pairing, programming in Java and other languages, and OO design.

In "Unit Tests Are FIRST," published in PragPub's January 2012 issue, Tim Ottinger and Jeff Langr break down the FIRST acronym for designing effective unit tests. We present and fix code examples showing FIRST violations for each of the five guidelines covered by the acronym.

In "Succeeding With and Sustaining TDD," published in the Java Tech Journal, Jeff Langr presents a laundry list of things you need to look for and monitor in a TDD shop. TDD is a significant investment and challenge; following these recommendations should help you more effectively sustain the practice over time. (Registration required.)

Jeff Langr and Tim Ottinger wrote about test abstraction in the April 2011 issue of PragPub magazine, presenting a detailed example of taking a poorly crafted test and cleaning it up by snuffing out a number of smells. The latest Agile in a Flash blog entry presents a new card listing eight smells, and discusses how to stomp out each of the affronts to good test abstraction.

In Jeff's latest blog entry, "Test-Driving a Heap-Based Priority Queue," he shows the incremental code progression for test-driving a priority queue that uses a heap as a backing data structure. Perhaps better suited as a kata (if you're in Java, where there's already a priority queue implementation), the challenge to readers is to find a better derivation.

Want some assistance in helping your manager understand test-driven development (TDD)? Send him or her a link to Jeff Langr's article in PragPub's November 2011 issue, which overviews what TDD is and discusses its costs and benefits. Jeff also presents some thoughts on how non-programmers might understand whether or not the team is doing TDD well.

"Distributed Agile": Oxymoron or reality? In this article for PragPub's October 2011 issue, Tim Ottinger and I talk about distributed teams and agile values. We present our (blog-only) Agile in a Flash card that contains a number of do's and don'ts for agile teams. We also provide a number of communication guidelines for working distributed.