Through this online programme we provide mentoring and support in order to help individuals improve their skills, resolve particular issues in their teams or get feedback on their current approach to specification by example, agile testing, behaviour driven development, agile retrospectives and related topics. This programme is designed for individuals who know the basics but want to improve and need support, knowledge and ideas not available online or through training courses.

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###What is in scope?

Anything related to Impact Mapping, Specification by Example, Agile Testing, BDD, ATDD and Agile Retrospectives. We can help implementing these ideas in your organisation, providing feedback on how to make specifications and tests easier to maintain or how to organise them, deciding what kind of tool you should use or where to start with automation, how to organise workshops, how to start changing the process. We will work with you to understand your particular issues or questions, provide ideas to try out and give you feedback on the progress. For example, the following questions would be in scope:

• Our specification workshops take too long - how do we improve them?
• We’re not getting the results we expected out of spec by example - what are we doing wrong?
• How detailed should our specifications be before they are ready for sprint?
• We’re suffering from test maintenance in Cucumber - how should we reorganise them?
• My BA doesn’t want to do this - how should I approach her?
• Is Cucumber right for us? or would Concordion be better?
• How do we set up the hierarchy of acceptance tests?
• Everything we do is end-to-end at the moment and very slow. How do we make it faster?
• Retrospective actions don’t seem to get completed - how can we turn our ideas into improvements?
• Many people see retrospectives as an overhead - how can we demonstrate their value?

What is out of scope?

This is a mentoring programme, not contract development or hands-on consultancy. On-site evaluation, proof-of-concept implementation, preparing templates and refining examples or investigating technical issues and facilitating workshops is outside the intended scope of this programme. For teams that need that level of support, we provide a full range of consulting services separate from this programme.We’ll provide some general guidance on tools, but detailed technical tool support is also out of scope. In short, we’ll provide feedback, suggest improvement ideas, answer questions, but we will not do your work for you. For example, the following would be out of scope:

• Here’s a 500 page document of requirements. How do I test this?
• My system runs on a horribly complex infrastructure - how would you approach automation in this case?
• We’re getting Null Pointer Exceptions running Cucumber-JVM 0.99 with Spring 2.63, how do we use those two versions together?
• Here is my QTP test, can you convert it to Cucumber?
• We discovered a bug in Robot Framework, can you fix it for us?

How does it work?

We’ll start with a short phone call to understand your needs and objectives, and then we’ll continue the conversation by e-mail. We will answer your e-mails typically the next working day for an initial period of one month.

###What if we don’t finish in one month?

We won’t be very strict about the end date, so if the end is in sight and you need a bit more help after 30 days, we’ll provide the additional feedback you need for free. If there is a lot more work to do, or if you want to keep getting support from us, we’ll give you preference over new applicants for the second group to extend the engagement.

Terms of service

The remote mentoring service is provided as an email-based service for a single point of contact per client.

• We will only respond to emails from the address registered at the time of purchase.
• You may send as many emails as you deem necessary.
• We will endeavour to respond to emails within two working days of receipt.
• When you purchase the service, we will contact you to arrange a mutually suitable time for a situation briefing telephone call.
• During this call, which may last up to one hour, we will discuss your situation and objectives for the mentoring programme, and agree the initial actions.
• The service duration is 30 days, starting from the day of the initial situation briefing call.
• Further telephone calls can be made (at your cost) only by prior email arrangement.
• The service must be paid for in advance. We accept all major credit cards or Paypal payments.
• The price for 30 days of remote mentoring is £900, plus 20% UK VAT where applicable
• The service may be extended for a further 30 days for a price of £450, providing the extension is made before the initial 30 days has expire.
• We won’t sign NDAs or offer payment via purchase orders or similar as part of this programme. We want to keep administration of this service as simple as possible to be able to offer this at an attractive price to you.
• If you are not entirely satisfied with the service, you may cancel within 5 days of the start for a full 100% refund.
• If you cancel after 5 days and within 10 days, you will receive a 50% refund.

###What if I need a NDA, purchase order, or something that is different from these terms?

We’ll be happy to help. We can provide consulting services under NDAs, go through purchase approval processes and everything else, but through our standard on-site consulting engagements. Contact us to get a quote for that.

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