Agile design processes are beginning to change the ways that people create training content. While agile design appeared in the L&D space only in the last few years, they took hold in the software industry much earlier, starting in the mid-1990s. Clearly there is overlap between L&D and the software industry, and if agile design works in both worlds, what other practices used by software development teams could help L&D create better training and work more effectively?

In this session, you’ll take a closer look at software development best practices and identify the opportunities for L&D professionals to learn from that industry. In particular, you’ll discuss pain points that training teams encounter and find out how software development practices have been built to address similar pain points. Finally, you’ll take specific software practices (such as version control, code libraries, and “commenting your code”) and adapt them to training development with examples from Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline projects.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the similarities between your existing processes and software development best practices
• About areas where your processes could be improved using techniques from the software development field
• How to improve consistency and quality when multiple developers work on separate, but related, content
• How to avoid common issues when multiple developers need to work on the same files

Audience:
Intermediate to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers

Technology discussed in this session:
Microsoft SharePoint, Basecamp, open-source or free tools, Adobe Captivate, and Articulate Storyline.