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I believe that to create great software you need to have Professional Teams and not just amateur Teams. However most software teams are amateurs that don’t follow the rules, don’t subscribe to engineering excellence, and don’t follow the values and principals
Many folks believe that a Sprint is an arbitrary length of time in which you create and release software. They look at their continuous delivery pipeline and say to themselves; “Why would I limit myself to shipping only once every two weeks?”
Over the years I have had many discussions about Agile vs Scrum process templates with both TFS and VSTS and migrated many Team Projects from Agile or CMMI templates to the Scrum Template.
Why is it that while there is a Government Cloud First policy there are so much fear of cloud in the public sector? I have been working with a number of government and local council agencies in the UK and I found that they are still trying to decide if cloud is a good idea.
I have been honoured by being asked to speak at Agile in Africa today on the topic of Kalabule or a Professional at Agile in Africa . I was a little disappointed when Nana asked me, as I had already booked a customer on those dates in Houston, Texas. Nana asked if I could do remote, so I could attend anyway :). This is my second presentation at Agile In Africa, and it sounds like this years event is just as awesome as the last.
I have been working with a number of customers in the last year that want to move to VSTS. While many of them want to do the full Collection import, many do not.
Last week I was teaching a Professional Scrum Foundations in Farnborough and I had to make sure that I got a hotel with awesome internet access. As well as teaching the class I Have two additional tasks for the week. The first was to have the honour of talking on ScrumPulse, Scrum.org’s webcast, and the second was to talk at the prestigious Dutch ALM Meetup.
I have had quite a few requests from folks that want to use the full capabilities of VSTS or TFS but really need to have the code published in Github as it is Open-Source. Well I build a few Open-Source projects and I want to have my cake and eat it too.. I want to be able to use the full power of VSTS to reduce the friction of doing Agility and DevOps, but I want to publish the code and output to Github for public consumption. As Github really is the only place to store OSS software we need to figure out how to handle that.
I have a repository on Codeplex that was the result of the code that I had to write to move my blog from GeeksWithBlogs many moons ago over to Wordpress. This was a very difficult process and recently quite a few of my friends have had to go through it as well. Since GeeksWithBlogs has been sold to ’the man’ many bugs have crept into the system and features are sparse. With the most recent request for access I decided it was time to ditch Codeplex and move to Github. If you have not seen the writing on the wall yet the only Open Source host of any note is GitHub. All my private repositories are in VSTS ( http://tfs.visualstudio.com ) but anything Open Source will be moved to GitHub.
Do you worry that you will lose files on your computer? Well you should! At any time your harddrive can fail, or your house could be hit by a meteor, or stolen. I keep everything on my computer encrypted with BitLocker and can remote wipe any of my data, however I want to be able to access it from anywhere. Everything needs to be in at least two locations to be called a backup, a local separate disk is only partial backup and realis on being at home to backup leading to stale data. That means that the only viable place to securely store your data is the cloud.
I recent ran into a problem where my OneDrive files were taking up too much space on my main drive and preventing Windows 10 updates on the Insider Program. This works for both OneDrive consumer application and the new OnDrive for Business beta application.
When someone comes to you with an opportunity in the developing world you better have a good reason to say no. For the last few years Nana Abana had been trying to achieve the impossible, conduct a high profile Agile event in West Africa. It’s not just the holding of the event that seemed impossible, but getting together a group of people that can really bring agility to Africa. Up until now many of the endeavours into agility in west africa have been pushed by sharlotons that are intent only in profiting from Africa and not improving development practices. Making money and not helping people. It is posible to do both, but you will need to invest up front to get there.
I have been working with a large customer in Norway that is moving to TFS whole sale and also needs to continue using a server based source control system for the time being. It would be awesome for them to be able to move to Git, however the codebase is currently incompatible. Work is ongoing to remove this issue, and many components will be able to move as soon as we can add Git repositories to a TFVC Team Project (in TFS 2015 Update 1). SO in the mean time we need a way to apply policies to particular branches.
Just before the end of the year I taught my first Professional Scrum Master course in Norway and it was a resounding success. We had 30 students from some of the largest and most successful companies in Norway. The feedback was incredible and I had an awesome time teaching it.
I was trying to setup a Build Agent within one of my current customers. They do over 1 million builds a year through Team City and I need to demonstrate that the new TFS build system is awesome before they will consider it. So it never instils confidence when you get an error…
Just a week or so ago I was at Microsoft Future Decoded event in London to talk about the new Release Management tools that will be made available at Connect() and that might make it in to TFS 2015 Update 2. Here is hoping! The focus of the track was on DevOps and the focus of my session was on both Build and Release.
I was in Norway for NDC Oslo 2015 and I was there to talk about “Big Scrum: All you need and not enough” which is a kind of oxymoron as it really is enough, you just need to apply the values and principals at scale. I tried to cover what for me is a total 100% requirement for Scale.
Last month I created an article for NDC Magazine on Scaling Scrum. The guys at NDC must have liked it as they decided to put it on the cover. This article is a discussion and investigation into what it means to be a Professional Scrum Team, why we need it, and how we can scale it.
It has been a while since I had to install, configure, or upgrade TFS. Most of my customers have been moving to Visual Studio Online (VSO) which is effectively TFS in the cloud, and that requires “migration” of data rather than “upgrade”. Although there are great reasons to pick VSO over TFS, even for enterprise , many companies have a cultural issue with the cloud and are not ready to go there yet. For this we still have TFS and all of its fantastic features are updated and improved for 2015.
By the launch of TFS 2010 we had given up on getting rename in TFS. 5 years of no rename had taken its toll. Now, as a surprise present with TFS 2015 (and on VSO) and I have a bunch of projects to “zz”. Did you know that you should always “zz” something before you delete it. If you delete something then its gone. If you prefix it with “zz” then it falls to the bottom of any list and you can ignore it until later… but if someone complains… you can easily recover it.
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