Software development has been plagued by problems. Fortunately, at the same time innovations in programming techniques are continuously made in order to deliver quality software that meets customers' requirements within schedule and budget. Starting from around 1998, a new school of software development methodologies collectively known as "Agile Software Development" is starting to capture the minds and hearts of developers worldwide because it can effectively address the various problems surrounding software development.

In 2002, CPTTM, the Macau Productivity and Technology Center, started to hold courses on eXtreme Programming and OO design to promote the skills in agile development. At the beginning, they hired a well known software training and consulting company in US to teach and later switched to use local instructors. However, because software design principles are abstract by nature, the students did not learn very well and never really acquired the expected skills on completion of the courses.

According to his many years of experiences in software development and training, Tong Ka Iok, the manager of the IT department of CPTTM, decided to develop a new set of training materials, by selecting only the essential skills in Agile Development, while ignoring those useful but non-essential skills. He explained these skills and principles in terms of examples and added a lot of real world examples as exercises. After adopting this set of materials, with exactly the same instructor, the new students learned better and more easily and really acquired the skills on completion.

This publication "Essential Skills for Agile Development" reflects the many years of experiences of Tong Ka Iok in software development and training. It is an effective way to learn to apply the skills in Agile Development and is an indispensable book for software development in general.

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