Visual Studio 2010 Overview - A day in the life of ... Plan, Code & Test
This session shows the Day in the Life of a project using TFS from the context of a Developer, Tester, and Program Manager. The purpose of this session is to give a clear picture of how someone in the role of the Developer, the Tester and Program Manager would use TFS in his/her role.
An adoption strategy for testing with Visual Studio 2010
Its hard for developers to work with testers and its hard for testers to work with developers. There are many tools out there to help teams break down those barriers between them and I really like both the features and workflow of Microsoft Test Manager (MTM). While I am not a tester, I am a developer and the rich bugs that are produced by MTM help me reproduce that evasive bug and improves my relationship with what should be my teammates.
What is the roll of the Project Manager in Scrum?
I get a lot of questions about the role of the Project Manger in the world of Scrum and there is usually a lot of hemming and hawing from consultants and Scrum coaches that want to take the touchy-feely approach.
SSRS vs SCVMM - The Kerberos token dispute
I have been working with one of my colleagues, Bryon, over the holidays in order to install both TFS and Lab management at a customer. Now that customer has some awesome hardware, but insisted on a physical TFS server. The DL320 with 18 cores, 42GB RAM and 2TB of storage make a pretty fast TFS server, but we did run into a couple of problems. The solution to the first problem caused the second problem.
The Sprint is a container for Planning and not necessarily for Delivery
I have been told time and again in the office that Scrum is an inflexible platform for developing software as it is way too prescriptive. This is far from reality and represents an invalid interpretation in the rules of the game. This fault lies not with those that have been turned away from the light, but with the fanatics that have brandished the burning torch and pitchfork at your door chanting “that is not Scrum because…”.
Can you really commit to delivering work?
There has been a subtle but targeted change in the wording used as part of Scrum. There has bee a move away from commitment towards forecasting what will be completed. Why is this happening and what does it mean to my team?
Always prompted for credentials in TFS 2010?
Sometimes when you setup TFS you find that your users, or just some of them, are being prompted for credentials. While manageable this is annoying and is not really related to TFS. This is an Active Directory thing and yes, there is a workaround…
Are you doing Scrum? Really?
This week I was at the ALM Summit in Redmond. There was a very interesting talk from David Starr of Scrum.org going over the recent changes in Scrum. These changes are, I think, designed to battle the things that have made Scrum unpalatable to many people.
Creating a backup in Team Foundation Server 2010 using the Power Tools
Over the last few years the product team has been putting their finishing touches on a backup module for the Team Foundation Server Administration Console. Why you might ask do you need another way to backup? Surely you can just backup the bits?
Enabling Google Plus Profiles for Google Apps users in under 2 minutes
It is finally here… just a short time ago Google enabled the ability to have Google Profiles and by extension Google+ on your customer Google Apps domain. However, you first need to enable it before you can use it.
Scrum with Visual Studio 11: Creating a Scrum team identity
I have been getting to grips with dev11 recently and I want to share a couple of thing that I like. The first of which is the ability to create teams and to automatically slice your work by that team.
Scrum with Visual Studio 11 - Creating a new Team Project
Creating a Team Project in the cloud could be daunting, but it is very simple. Just fire up your web browser and you can be up an running asynchronously in no time.
Process Template Upgrade #3 - Destroy all Work Items and Import new ones
A little while ago I was looking into the best options for upgrading a process template but still keep your data intact , but there is still a little bit of ambiguity on how that is achieved. Lets look at the #3 option from that set in a little more detail.
Product Owners are not a myth
Steven Borg brought “ 5 Reasons Why a Product Owner Team Might Be a Good Idea ” to my attention which in turn lead me to read “ Is Scrum a –ism that doesn’t work for real? ”, and for me there seams to be a certain amount of “missing the point” and I wanted to try to find it.
Allow user to change the region for Windows Live ID billing
Recently I was burned rather heavily be Microsoft Billing due to their inability to change the region (country) of an account. Yes, you heard me right, there is NO way to change your billing region and the ONLY solution Microsoft can offer is to create a new account.
Are Scrum Masters agents for change?
If you are interested in finding out more about Scrum and how to implement it you might be interested in the Professional Scrum Master certification. Think of it not as becoming a “Master” of anything, but just making sure that you are not going to be a danger to those around you.
Caffeinating Your Development Lifecycle in Bellevue on October 13th
Northwest Cadence has decided that while online events are good, nothing beats in-person. If you’re in the area and available, we would love to have you attend our inaugural event at the Microsoft Store in Bellevue in a few weeks!
Scrum is hard to adopt and disruptive to your organisation
Before the “ Professional Scrum Foundations ” course ever existed I was tasked with delivering a practical Scrum foundation course for our customers. I came up with a 2 day “Scrum Foundation” course that included lots of practical exercises and leveraged the existing Scrum Open exam. But why would you want it and is that all you need?
Not just happy, but ecstatic
As a consultant I have customers. Unfortunately being a consultant rather than a contractor has the down side that I hardly ever here from my customers after my engagement ends.
You are doing Scrum but the Scrum Master tells the team what to do!
If you are doing Scrum but the Scrum Master tells the team what to do then you may be missing the point. Ultimately the Scrum Master should never tell the Development Team what to do and they should make sure that the Development Team has both the knowledge and the skills to work things out for themselves. This is critical to the teams ability to self organise going forward because we all learn by the mistakes we make.
Testing with Test Professional 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
On Monday 24th October one of our consultants, Dan Wood, is presenting our course on Testing with Visual Studio ALM. The course is running on Monday 24th October and I managed to get NWC to provide 10 additional seats for you guys at the discounted rate.
Subversion to TFS 2010: The migration engine is unable to resolve a conflict where two changes have the same target item
Running into problems when migrating a Subversion Repository to Team Foundation Server is what to so with conflicts resulting from SVN being Case Sensitive and TFS not.
Subversion to TFS 2010: Dealing with invalid Subversion SSL certificates and migrations
Migrating data from SVN to TFS can be both a timely and a costly business. I was trying out the two tools TFS Integration Platform & Timely Migration but I ran into what looked like the same problem in both if them.
Coffee Talk: Introduction to Scrum - webcast event this Friday!
If you attended Coffee Talk: Scrum versus Kanban (re-match) … Thursday at High Noon! where I trumped Steven Borg’s Kantban or even Steven’s session on Coffee Talk: Introduction to Kanban then you should also attend this…
Upgrading your Process Template in Team Foundation Server
Upgrading your Process Template in Team Foundation Server regardless of the version is pretty hard to achieve. Think of it like changing your mind on the blueprints of a building after you have finished construction. If you are making a small change, like adding a field, then this will be easy. But if you want to fundamentally change the structure of your work items and their workflow then you are looking at a bigger and much more complicated solution.
Coffee Talk: Scrum versus Kanban (re-match) ... Thursday at High Noon!
Because of the phenomenal success of the Scrum versus Kanban session that Steven Borg an I did today, we plan on having a rematch to see if Kanban can make a comeback.
Coffee Talk: Scrum versus Kanban
I am doing a free session this Friday with Steven Borg to help folks understand the differences between Scrum and Kanban and where each fit. This will be an introductory session and future sessions will be split with Steven Box doing the Kanban and me doing the Scrum sessions.
Disqus & Chrome with non-support
I am having a problem on my blog with comments. Namely that you cant see any! This is the downside of relying on a third party tool, but do the problems out weight the benefits?
Upgrading from TFS 2008 and WSS v3.0 with SfTSv2 to TFS 2010 and SF 2010 with SfTSv3
I have been working with a rather large customer that have over 150GB in Team Foundation Server with over 10GB in SharePoint. They are also using the Scrum for Team System v2 (SfTSv2) Process template that is not supported under TFS 2010 so I need to upgrade those process templates to Scrum for Team System v3 (SfTSv3).
Configuring a PowerShell Adapter for the TFS Integration Platform
We have a customer who really, really want to ship source code from Team Foundation Server (TFS) to Perforce. Why you might ask… Well for many companies they can’t just migrate, they either need some sort of safety net, or have an external requirement that they MUST use a particular system as a matter of record.
