As a test professional, you are committed to enhancing your professional competence, ensuring that your skills and knowledge are up to date, and enhancing your career. Maintaining currency in your profession is particularly important in today’s fast moving technological world as new technologies, techniques, and methods seem to be introduced on a daily basis.

ITEA provides a variety of professional development formats -- including online and face-to-face learning -- to help you to maintain, develop or increase your knowledge, problem-solving, technical skills or professional performance standards. ITEA also provides options for bringing live courses, which can be can be tailored to the needs of your organization, to your location which can reduce your training costs up to 50%. For more information on hosting a course on your site, please contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . 

Go here for the latest schedule of upcoming Professional Development Events.  

Go here for the 2012 Course Catalog

Professional Development Courses Currently Being Offered

Combinatorial Testing with Design of Experiments (DOE) - This course covers the key terminology of DOE and various options to testing, showing why DOE is the most effective and efficient testing approach. This course will cover the activities that must precede a DOE, including the first line of defense against variation and Measurement System Analysis (MSA). Testing strategies, such as screening, modeling, and confirmation, will be discussed, along with how they fit into an integrated developmental and operational testing strategy. The 12-step approach to experimental design will be presented to provide a framework for adequately considering all aspects of the test. Basic graphical and statistical analysis of experimental data will be covered. This course will cover many examples in the world of test and evaluation and give the student practice at test design and analyzing test results. It will provide the practitioner with the ability and rationale to make good decisions when conducting both developmental and operational tests under a wide variety of circumstances. DOE will be shown to be the science of data collection as it applies to testing and that it must be in the toolkit of anyone who has something to do with a test and evaluation process—from planning to execution and evaluation.

Cybersecurity and Information Assurance - Cybersecurity and Information Assurance are related practices that share objectives, but which differ in methods. Both are necessary to developing, operating and managing systems and networks. They complement one another when organized and structured correctly, which requires planning and vision in an organization. This two-day course will help systems engineers, program managers, IA managers, network owners, and systems assurance planners to understand one another. It will also provide concrete steps, actions, methods and checklists for implementing auditable, manageable system security across the system life cycle.

Fundamentals of Agile:  A Pragmatic Approach to Adopting Agile - Organizations today are seeking ways to improve the efficiency of their software development efforts while still meeting quality objectives. Competitive pressures and customer demands continue to reduce software product release schedules, driving organizations to seek fresh new approaches to building software. Agile software development methods are often cited as a way to accelerate software delivery and get more done with less. However, blindly following the high level advice given in Agile books and presentations often not address the realities of making Agile work in the real world. This two-day course teaches you to pragmatically apply Agile methods to your software development process and organization. You will learn how to plan, communicate, implement, and deploy software applications using Agile. This course includes a running case study that allows course participants to apply Agile planning and implementation techniques throughout the course. Small groups will be formed, and a product will be planned and implemented from scratch. Teams present their product to the class at the end of the course. Attendees will leave Fundamentals of Agile with an in-depth understanding of how to apply Agile to a variety of software development situations.

Fundamentals of the Test and Evaluation Process - This three-day intensive course will describe the key principles of T&E as a critical part of systems engineering. The current world of T&E has evolved over the last 4 decades from a slogan mantra ("try before buy") to a set of widely accepted principles and integrated practices. Industry and government experience has produced processes that now enable T&E to be a dependable indicator of progress towards achieving system performance objectives during a development program. The course will describe the procedures and tools that have emerged from U.S. military weapons acquisition programs and have been embraced by other government agencies. The instructors not only will focus on the application of this experience in the U.S. government programs, but also will describe how they are similarly applied in commercial programs and consumer product developments. Past course participants have included professionals from industry and from government, including the Departments of Defense, Energy, Homeland Security and Transportation.

Modeling and Simulation Verification, Validation, and Accreditation (M&S VV&A) - The objective of this three-day course is to enable students to conduct a verification, validation and accreditation of model or simulation software. Students will receive references, web links, and checklists that will provide a basis for the conduct of a VV&A activity. Special consideration will be given to VV&A challenges pertaining to language (e.g., object-oriented programs, data base queries), operating environments (e.g., Linux/MS-DOS, client-server/network), algorithmic approaches (e.g., adaptive software/neural networks, parallel processing/grid computing), and applications (e.g., time series, real-time systems). Discussions will include demonstrations of verification and validation of models. 

Systems Engineering, Test and Evaluation, and Program Management:  Integrated Processes - Systems Engineering (SE), Test and Evaluation (T&E), and Program Management (PM)  are often perceived as seperate processes and seperate communities. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Private industry has long understood the importance of T&E to inform the SE process, and the leadership of Defense Acquisition is pushing the infusion of SE into development, acquisition, and T&E. This two-day course will not only help systems engineers, program managers, testers, and evaluators to understand one another, but will begin to educate this combined community on how these disciplines must integrate into a unified and rigorous technical and managerial process.