Effective Thoughts

Thanks to all who attended Alexei's and my Scrum for TFS 2010 Thursday at the Path to Agility conference. Please contact us if you have follow-up questions. We posted the deck here .

I'll be leading a panel and presenting at the Path to Agility conference Thursday May 27th. The panel at 1:15PM is entitled "Attracting and Leading Agile Developers". The presentation at 3:00PM is entitled "Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010". Hope to see you there!

I'm excited to deliver a break-out session at The Path to a-gil-i-ty conference coming up May 27th. The presenter line-up looks fantastic...I'm eager to sit in on the other talks! I'll be speaking along with Alexei Govorine on managing Scrum projects leveraging the recently released Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. Click here for COAAH write up and registration . My firm, Cardinal Solutions is a sponsor.

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 .

Thanks for everyone attending my " Implementing an Agile Software Development Process with Team Foundation Server (TFS) " presentation today. We enjoyed some good discussion. I had a few TFS-related questions pop up which I thought I'd address in a post: Q. Is it possible to fail the build but only if a specific test fails? So, let's say we have 3 tests. If Test01 or Test02 fail, fail the build. If Test03 fails, don't fail the build. A. Not that I'm aware of. If any test fails in a build but compilation succeeded, that build lists a state of Partially Succeeded. With TFS 2008 SP1, we received a property to modify or control this behavior: TreatTestFailureAsBuildFailure. If true (false is the default), any test failure will set the build state to Failed (vs. Partially Succeeded). Nice write-up here . You might take the approach of creating two separate builds: one that contains all your tests and one containing just mission critical tests. Set TreatTestFailureA...

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.