Introduction

In our changing industry, training is needed to keep pace with the release of new tools and techniques, to get the right skills to handle promotions in the project management track or simply to get the most out of the new release of a software development environment.

Training courses come in many forms. You got the one week components training with its bonus trip to the Côte d'Azur or to Florida, the internal three days course on SQL standards, the half-day seminar to understand everything about UML or the two-hour video on Java or e-commerce. Even if every brain exercise is a good thing, how many of these training courses are really useful for your day to day activities as a software developer or a project manager? How many good training will you find on configuration management, designing application architecture, software testing or negotiating with the end user? Sadly, training can often be considered as the "lost benefit" of the software development jobs. You will often hear a lot about it in the offers or the interviews, but you will have few occasions to enjoy it in regular jobs... Bad luck, as it seems that organisations that offer more training to their software development employees enjoy a higher quality for their software development process.

This affirmation is based on software process evaluations performed by Martinig & Associates in recent years with 63 medium to large software development units, mainly in Europe and North America. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is used as a basis to evaluate the quality of the software development process. (go to www.sei.cmu.edu for more information about the SEI and the CMM).