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!

Microsoft Research has a great tool for automatic unit test generation (Pex) and delegate method replacement (Moles).  These tools can be a great way to get unit testing up and running on your brownfield project.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/

I have a couple of custom-written apps that allow teams to track current progress on a projector using TFS.  I just found a community project on CodePlex that looks like a promising replacement, Scrum Sprint Monitor.

Scrum Sprint Monitor provides the Agile team with hands-off, always up-to-date status of the current Sprint, both at the individual and team level. It is designed to run either on a large LCD screen located in a public area, or as a desktop application.

Looks like a great product!  If you try it, let me know what you think.

While BlogEngine.net(BE) has a nice feed import/export mechanism, I wanted complete control on my .Text blog data was pulled into BE.  Additionally, I wanted to be able to redirect my old .Text permalinks to the new guid driven BE permalinks.  This required that I add the integer post and category IDs from .Text into the BE database.  In order to accomplish all this, I wrote some TSQL to do the conversion.  Here it is:

.Text to BlogEngine.net SQL Script

Yes it’s true! Microsoft released VS2008 today. Scott informs me that Microsoft will be doing a launch party for the .NET User Group on Dec. 11th. Sign up here.

I'm very excited to hear that VS2008 will be released at the end of this month sometime! Brad Abrams posted a great diagram of what's included in .NET 3.5.

I just discovered that Google has a fairly impressive .NET client library to interface with their services. Looks like you can talk to Blogger, Calendar, Spreadsheet, Code Search, Picasa and YouTube just to name a few. I'd love to be able to talk to Analytics, but I'm not sure if I can.

Channel 9 has a great behind-the-scenes look at some of the people and hardware involved with MS multi-touch. I can't help thinking of Tom Cruise in Minority Report when I watch stuff like this:

Got more comment spam last night! Even with Captcha turned on! (Thanks casey) Time to try something a little different.

That would be Charlie Calvert's Community Convergence. A great list of links related to C#, LINQ, F#, PFX, etc.