Effective Thoughts

I'm honored to be presenting at the DogFood Conference again this year. I'll be delivering a session entitled "Engaging nondevelopers in Visual Studio 2010/TFS/ALM" on Friday. Hope to see you there! Update (11/03/2010): I posted my deck on SkyDrive...but you still need to attend in person! (Lots of demos...)

In case you missed it, Brian Harry announced Microsoft's Scrum process template this week at TechEd in New Orleans. Very exciting. Great work, Aaron and team!

Last Thursday, I spoke on Agile (Scrum) with TFS 2010 . A lot of great conversation and questions came out. A few I wanted to follow up with: Q. Has security administration improved with 2010? A. Yes, fellow MVP Paul Hacker points out the new TFSAdmin 2.0 tool on CodePlex . Q. Is anyone doing hosted TFS? A. Yes, again see Paul Hacker's firm SaaS Made Easy .

Very excited to announce we've (well, Alexei deserves all the credit) landed Doug Neumann for COALMG 's November meeting! Date/Time: Thursday November 5th, 6PM, Polaris Microsoft Office (4th Floor) Abstract: Visual Studio 2010 is almost here, and with it comes a host of new capabilities for application lifecycle management in Team Foundation Server. In this talk, we'll survey the new features in TFS 2010, starting with enhancements to the core features of version control, work item tracking, and build automation and then venturing into new capabilities for executing agile projects, managing quality assurance activities, and simplifying the provisioning of virtualized testing environments. There's a lot to learn with Team Foundation Server 2010, but this talk will cover the foundations and get you on your way to becoming an expert. Biography: Doug Neumann has been working on Team Foundation Server since its inception in early 2003 when he was responsible for designing...

If you work for a State or Local Government operation in central Ohio, bug your boss to attend TFS Day December 9th and 10th. Along with Brian Prince and Alexei Govorine , I'll be delivering a full day and a half on VSTS and TFS. Look forward to seeing you there!

"Mark Mydland is the Principal Group Manager of the Visual Studio Team System Test Edition team (that means that all program managers, developers, and testers on VSTS Test in Redmond report up to him)." See Jennifer's post . We'll be hosting Mark on November 14th during the day at a client but I'm also excited to announce he'll also be delivering a technical talk that evening in conjunction with CONDG and COALMG at the Microsoft Polaris offices.

Announcing the first meeting of the Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Managment Group (COALMG) . First, check this post to discover more about Application Lifecycle Managment (ALM). To accommodate the schedule of our speaker, we've moved our meeting this month to Tuesday April 29th from 5:30-7:30pm at the Polaris Microsoft office. (Normally, we meet every other month on the 1st Thursday, opposite the MOCSDUG.org user group.) Our web site is www.COALMG.org . Look forward to seeing you there! Writing Maintainable and Robust Applications with Visual Studio Team System Meeting Date & Time: 4/29/2008 5:30PM Session Description: Microsoft Visual Studio Team System is an extensible, life-cycle tools platform that helps software teams collaborate to deliver modern, service-oriented solutions. Visual Studio Team System is designed so every role in the development team has an integrated, seamless experience with the tools they are most comfortable with. Code Analysis, Code ...

I'm asked this frequently. What is ALM? First off, the acronym stands for Application Lifecycle Management. Here's the WikiPedia write-up on ALM but essentially, it's the process and tools your team uses to construct software. Kind of like SDLC but a whole lot more. The best explanation of ALM (I think) comes from Eric Sink who asks and answers " What is ALM? Traceability. " Yes, it's long but worth the read. We hope to answer this and lots of other questions about software development with the new group we formed called the Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Management Group (COALMG) . Check it out. We hope to see you there!

Recently, a professor at a local university contacted us to assist with an approach to managing a class assignment in an agile fashion. Typically, we leverage fairly "heavy" tools to manage agile projects: Rational Requisit Pro , TFS , etc. These students have just a few weeks to develop their solution and the professor didn't want to burn a lot of time learning a management tool. This situation is analogous to source code control. We don't want something "heavy" like ClearQuest or Serena and we have limited budget. What do you choose? Subversion . Done. With this in mind as well as taking cost into consideration ($0 budget), I discovered a tool that looks very promising: VersionOne Agile Management software. Disclaimer: I have yet to use this tool but it comes highly recommended. If you find yourself in a similar situation, give it a shot and let me know how it turns out.