Obtiva and 8th Light are currently stressing out Software Craftsmanship in an apprenticeship program between the two. Jim Suchy currently writes down experiences from each day on their blog. The entries for the first three days can be found here, here and here. While taking out the links for this entry, I also ran over Colin’s Apprenticeship.

As it turns out I ran into the idea two times during the last few weeks. One of our business analyst from our product development department stated some weeks ago that he has been asking for taking some kind of apprenticeship in the System Integration department in order to get to know the product he is defining. While the technical view of the product is rather clear to him, he stated that he is unsure of the actual use cases during System Integration work, where we configure most of the system for the end customer.

Some weeks earlier I ran over the idea as a tester to work on-site for your end customer in Lisa Crispin’s and Janet Gregory’s book. From the viewpoint of a tester I would be able to follow the mission to deliver working software to the customer in a better way when I had some experience on how the product will be used in the day-to-day work. By attending call-center calls and participating while our product is used to sell product to the end-consumers of our customers, I would get a very good picture of the business flow and the motivation behind it. Exactly what Gojko Adzic addresses in Bridging the Communication Gap.

Today I sat down with a former group lead in order to identify what I shall present on FIT end of next week. While we were discussing things I stated that two of my colleagues will be on vacational leave for four weeks during summer this year, since they will become fathers. While discussing the bottleneck in which we will get by then, he made the suggestion to exchange one of his testers with my group in order to get deeper knowledge on how we use FIT as a testing framework. Personally I think of it as an apprenticeship program, that could lead in improved communications between our two departments. Hopefully something great is going to be built out of this idea – but I’ll try to motivate and follow-up on this idea.