I thought I would give a shout out to Richard Hundhausen in anticipation of his new book.  I’ve been helping to review the book as he is writing it and this is going to be a phenomenal piece of work!  It will likely release in October and will surely be a staple for many of my coaching engagements.  Pre-order yours today!

I just finished reading Sam Guckenheimer and Neno Loje’s new book “Agile Software Engineering with Visual Studio.”  Great job guys!

Some observations:

• They appear to provide a fairly clear picture of Scrum.
• I love the fact they cover mura, muri and muda.
• I don’t like their explanation of technical debt.
• Great discussions on “Analysis Paralysis.”
• They pull in Lean and Kanban very nicely.
• Tacit knowledge is mentioned.
• Inclusion of Product Backlog grooming which many Scrum books overlook.
• Good discussion on Kano Analysis. (nice picture of Stephanie Cuthbertson and team!)
• Good discussion on Empirical vs. Defined Process Control.
• They present some great information on metrics and agile.
• Finally! A good description and discussion on Emergent Architecture!
• They talk about using branching sparingly then dive into a head-on discussion of a mature branching schema. I would have liked to have seen a discussion of lighter-weight methods.
• Sam and Neno advocate for integration as often as possible.  Awesome!
• The handling of testing is a bit dicey and appears to target the use of TFS/Visual Studio over good Agile practices.
• Good discussion on exploratory testing!
• Don’t care for their “Handling Bugs” section.

Quotes I really like:

• “you do not measure planned tasks completed as the primary indicator of progress; you count units of value delivered. “ (pg. 8)
• “Lean turns governance on its head, by trusting teams to work toward a shared goal, and using measurement transparency to allow teams to improve the flow of value and reduce waste themselves.“ (pg. 14)
• “Note that this does not mean that all tasks are known on the first day of the sprint. On the contrary, tasks may be added to the sprint backlog whenever necessary.“ (pg. 29)
• “mastery of Scrum is really for the whole team, not just a designated individual.” (pg. 76)
• “Unfortunately, using metrics to evaluate individual performance is often horribly counterproductive” (pg. 81)
• “use branches sparingly and intentionally. If you need to do something temporary, use a shelveset instead. ” (pg. 162)
• “A potential dysfunction is that integration fails. Integration issues, such as merging, are a common source of unhappiness and waste in teams.” (pg. 197)
• (Regarding test automation) “Automation is useful when it achieves high coverage and when the tests will be used many times for many configurations across many changes in the software under test (SUT).” (pg. 219)
• “work should be sequenced to facilitate getting PBIs through acceptance testing to done as quickly as possible.” (pg. 235)

This is a very good primer for using TFS and Visual Studio Ultimate within a Scrum environment!  This book coupled with Scrum.org’s Professional Scrum Developer course and you should be up and running in no time!