My first Scrum team in the wild

Naked ALM Consulting Logo

Over the last year I have invested a lot in Scrum. A few months ago I was assigned to teach a two day Scrum course for which I had to build and deliver the material. The team that received the beta of the course has now just finished their first sprint! Although I was unable […]

How Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server enable Compliance

One of the things that makes Team Foundation Server (TFS) the most powerful Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform is the traceability it provides to those that use it. This traceability is crucial to enable many companies to adhere to many of the Compliance regulations to which they are bound (e.g. CFR 21 Part 11 or […]

Do you want to be an ALM Consultant?

Northwest Cadence is looking for our next great consultant! At Northwest Cadence, we have created a work environment that emphasizes excellence, integrity, and out-of-the-box thinking.  Our customers have high expectations (rightfully so) and we wouldn’t have it any other way!   Northwest Cadence has some of the most exciting customers I have ever worked with […]

Commit to Visual Studio ALM on Area51

A few weeks ago I proposed a new community for StackExchange and it has been growing at an exponential rate. We are about half way there, but we need your help to make this community a success.   Update 16th August 2010 – The Proposal has now moved from Proposed to the Committed stage and […]

Guidance: How to layout you files for an Ideal Solution

Creating a solution and having it maintainable over time is an art and not a science. I like being pedantic and having a place for everything, no matter how small. For setting up the Areas to run Multiple projects under one solution see my post on  When should I use Areas in TFS instead of […]

Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010 Done

Since I have joined SSW as a Solution Architect its Chief Architect, Adam Cogan, has been mentoring me and pushing me to do better. One of the things that I have been wanting to do since the first DDD Scotland was to present a session. For DDD Scotland 2010 Adam suggested that I submit he […]

Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but […]

Do you have a contract between the Product Owner and the Team?

Working in Scrum it is useful to define a Sprint Contract between the Product Owner (PO) and the implementation Team. Doing this helps to improve common understanding in, and sometimes to enforce, the relationship between the PO and the Team. Update 14th April 2010 Rule added to Rules to better Scrum with TFS This is […]

Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010

I will be presenting a session on “Scrum for TFS2010” not once, but twice! If you are going to be at the Aberdeen Partner Group meeting on 27th April, or DDD Scotland on 8th May then you may be able to catch my session. Credit: I want to give special thanks to Aaron Bjork from […]

Guidance – Branching for each Sprint

There are a lot of developers using version control these days, but a feature of version control called branching is very poorly understood and remains unused by most developers in favour of Labels. Most developers think that branching is hard and complicated. Its not! What is hard and complicated is a bad branching strategy. Just […]