Cognotive STAMP

Cognotive's Structured Training And Mentoring Programme is designed to successfully upskill a Java development team. The programme is aimed at developers with a range of experience from little or no Java skills to those that have used it before. The difference is where they start on the programme.

"The aim is to give your developers the practical skills they need without losing expensive project time to training."

We use a combination of proactive mentoring, formal classroom training and architectural consulting to train your team and complete a vertical section of your project. As training is focused around your project the developers will find it a lot easier to absorb the information and a section of your project will have been completed in the process.

Prior to running this service, a number of factors will be taken into account including: 

• the number of team members to upskill 
• their experience level 
• time-scale if the upskilling is required by a certain time

Isn't it risky developing a system before we are fully trained?
Yes, that is why we run the training for each layer of the architecture before the work is undertaken. In addition the mentors will also perform a QA role. This way each piece of work will be completed by a team which has the basic skills they need, and has an expert on hand to help.

I've had "off-the-shelf" training before, it didn't quite fit!
One of the problems with "off-the-shelf" training packages is that they often spend time on subjects that are not relevant to you, using tools that are not relevant to you, at the expense of the topics that are relevant to you. We will not do that.

Before the programme commences one of our Senior consultants will spend some time with you to find out exactly what would best suit you. You will not be charged for this services and it includes: 

• What OO experience you already have in the team 
• Team size and division of roles 
• Which technology you are moving from 
• Which Application Server you are intending to use (if applicable) 
• Which IDE you are intending to use. 
• What your initial project is, and decide with you, what would be an appropriate vertical section of the project.

For example the OO training you would require if moving from Oracle Forms is very different to what you require if moving from C++.

This is an example of the program.

Week 0 Initial Requirements gathering and selection of vertical section of project
Week 1 CT110 - Object Oriented Analysis and Design
Week 2 Practical experience gained by actually completing the Analyse and Design for the project.
Week 3 CT200 - Introduction to Java
Week 4 Revisit design. Architecture is introduced through mentoring sessions. Start building some of the architectural layers.
Week 5 CT222 - J2EE Development with JDeveloper
Week 6 Revisit architecture. Start building the J2EE layers
Week 7 Oracle TopLink or Eclipse Persistence Services Project (EclipseLink)
Week 8 Build persistence layer. By the end of this week there should be a working end to end application.
Week 9 CT240 - Advanced Topics in Java and J2EE Application Development
Week 10/11 Refactor and tune existing code. By the end of this fortnight there should be a good quality, maintainable, scaleable end-to-end application.

After the initial training there will be ongoing mentoring and periodic code reviews, which are faded out as the team gets more experienced.