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• Adventures in Scrum: Lesson 1 &ndash; The failed Sprint

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I recently had a conversation with a product owner that wanted to have the Scrum team broken up into smaller units so that less time was wasted on the Scrum Ceremonies! Their complaint was around the need in Scrum to have the entire “Team” (7+-2) involved in the sizing of the work during the “Sprint Planning Meeting”.  The standard flippant answer of all Scrum professionals, “Well that's not Scrum”, does not get you any brownie points in these situations. The response could be “Well we are not doing Scrum then” which in turn leads to “We are doing Scrum…But, we have split the scrum team into units of 2/3 so that they can concentrate on a specific area of work”. While this may work, it is not Scrum and should not be called so… It is just a form of Agile. Don’t get me wrong at this stage, there is nothing wrong with Agile, just don’t call it Scrum. The reason that the Product Owner wants to do this is that, in effect, through a number of miscommunications and failings in our implementation of Scrum, there was NO unit of potentially Shippable software at the end of the first sprint. It does not matter to them that most Scrum teams will fail the first Sprint, even those that are high performing teams. Remember it is the product owners their money! We should NOT break up scrum teams into smaller units for the purpose of having less people tied up in the Scrum Ceremonies. The amount of backlog the Team selects is solely up to the Team… Only the Team can assess what it can accomplish over the upcoming Sprint. - Scrum Guide, Scrum.org The entire team must accept the work and in order to understand what they can accept they must be free to size it as a team. This both encourages common understanding and increases visibility on why team members think a task is of a particular size. This has the benefit of increasing the knowledge of the entire team in the problem domain. A new Team often first realizes that it will either sink or swim as a Team, not individually, in this meeting. The Team realizes that it must rely on itself. As it realizes this, it starts to self-organize to take on the characteristics and behaviour of a real Team. - Scrum Guide, Scrum.org This paragraph goes to the why of having the whole team at the meeting; The goal of Scrum it to produce a unit of potentially shippable software at the end of every Sprint. In order to achieve this we need high performing teams and this is what Scrum as a framework has been optimised to produce. I think that our Product Owner is understandably upset over loosing two weeks work and is losing sight the end goal of Scrum in the failures of the moment. As the man spending the money, I completely understand his perspective and I think that we should not have started Scrum on an internal project, but selected a customer  that is open to the ideas and complications of Scrum. So, what should we have NOT done on our first Scrum project: Should not have had 3 interns as the only on site resource – This lead to bad practices as the experienced guys were not there helping and correcting as they usually would. Should not have had the only experienced guys offsite – With both the experienced technical guys in completely different time zones it was difficult to get time for questions. Helping the guys on site was just plain impossible. Should not have used a part time ScrumMaster – Although the ScrumMaster attended all of the Ceremonies, because they are only in 2 full days of the week it makes it difficult for the team to raise impediments as they go. Should not have used a proxy product owner. – This was probably the worst decision that was made. Mainly because the proxy product owner did not have the same vision as the product owner. While Scrum does not explicitly reject the idea of a Proxy Product Owner, I do not think it works very well in practice. The “single wringable neck” needs to contain both the Money and the Vision as well as attending the required meetings. I will be brining all of these things up at the Sprint Retrospective and we will learn from our mistakes and move on. Do, Inspect then Adapt…   Technorati Tags: Scrum,Sprint Planing,Sprint Retrospective,Scrum.org,Scrum Guide,Scrum Ceremonies,Scrummaster,Product Owner Need Help? Professional Scrum Developer Training SSW has six Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools.

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• Hide email adress with JavaScript

  - by Martin Aleksander

  I read somewhere that hiding email address behind JavaScript code, could reduce spam bots harvesting the email address. <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> var a = "Red"; var t = "no"; var doc = document; var b = "ITpro"; var ad = a; ad += "@"; ad += b; ad += "."; ad += t; var mt = "ma"; mt += "il"; mt += "to"; var text = ""; if (text == null || text.length == 0) text = ad; doc.write("<"+"a hr"+"ef=\""+mt+":"+ad+"\">"+text+"</"+"a>"); </script> This will not display the actual email-address in the sourcecode of the page, but it will display and work like a normal link for human users. Is it any point of doing this? Will it reduce spam bots, or is it just nonsense that might slow down performance of the page because of the JavaScript?

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• Guidance: How to layout you files for an Ideal Solution

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Creating a solution and having it maintainable over time is an art and not a science. I like being pedantic and having a place for everything, no matter how small. For setting up the Areas to run Multiple projects under one solution see my post on  When should I use Areas in TFS instead of Team Projects and for an explanation of branching see Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams. Update 17th May 2010 – We are currently trialling running a single Sprint branch to improve our history. Whenever I setup a new Team Project I implement the basic version control structure. I put “readme.txt” files in the folder structure explaining the different levels, and a solution file called “[Client].[Product].sln” located at “$/[Client]/[Product]/DEV/Main” within version control. Developers should add any projects you need to create to that solution in the format “[Client].[Product].[ProductArea].[Assembly]” and they will automatically be picked up and built automatically when you setup Automated Builds using Team Foundation Build. All test projects need to be done using MSTest to get proper IDE and Team Foundation Build integration out-of-the-box and be named for the assembly that it is testing with a naming convention of “[Client].[Product].[ProductArea].[Assembly].Tests” Here is a description of the folder layout; this content should be replicated in readme files under version control in the relevant locations so that even developers new to the project can see how to do it. Figure: The Team Project level - at this level there should be a folder for each the products that you are building if you are using Areas correctly in TFS 2010. You should try very hard to avoided spaces as these things always end up in a URL eventually e.g. "Code Auditor" should be "CodeAuditor". Figure: Product Level - At this level there should be only 3 folders (DEV, RELESE and SAFE) all of which should be in capitals. These folders represent the three stages of your application production line. Each of them may contain multiple branches but this format leaves all of your branches at the same level. Figure: The DEV folder is where all of the Development branches reside. The DEV folder will contain the "Main" branch and all feature branches is they are being used. The DEV designation specifies that all code in every branch under this folder has not been released or made ready for release. And feature branches MUST merge (Forward Integrate) from Main and stabilise prior to merging (Reverse Integration) back down into Main and being decommissioned. Figure: In the Feature branching scenario only merges are allowed onto Main, no development can be done there. Once we have a mature product it is important that new features being developed in parallel are kept separate. This would most likely be used if we had more than one Scrum team working on a single product. Figure: when we are ready to do a release of our software we will create a release branch that is then stabilised prior to deployment. This protects the serviceability of of our released code allowing developers to fix bugs and re-release an existing version. Figure: All bugs found on a release are fixed on the release.  All bugs found in a release are fixed on the release and a new deployment is created. After the deployment is created the bug fixes are then merged (Reverse Integration) into the Main branch. We do this so that we separate out our development from our production ready code.  Figure: SAFE or RTM is a read only record of what you actually released. Labels are not immutable so are useless in this circumstance.  When we have completed stabilisation of the release branch and we are ready to deploy to production we create a read-only copy of the code for reference. In some cases this could be a regulatory concern, but in most cases it protects the company building the product from legal entanglements based on what you did or did not release. Figure: This allows us to reference any particular version of our application that was ever shipped.   In addition I am an advocate of having a single solution with all the Project folders directly under the “Trunk”/”Main” folder and using the full name for the project folders.. Figure: The ideal solution If you must have multiple solutions, because you need to use more than one version of Visual Studio, name the solutions “[Client].[Product][VSVersion].sln” and have it reside in the same folder as the other solution. This makes it easier for Automated build and improves the discoverability of your code and its dependencies. Send me your feedback!   Technorati Tags: VS ALM,VSTS Developing,VS 2010,VS 2008,TFS 2010,TFS 2008,TFBS

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• PHP may be executing as a "privileged" group and user, which could be a serious security vulnerability

  - by Martin

  I ran some security tests on a Ubuntu 12.04 Server, and I've got these warnings : PHP may be executing as a "privileged" group, which could be a serious security vulnerability. PHP may be executing as a "privileged" user, which could be a serious security vulnerability. In /etc/apache2/envvars, I have this: export APACHE_RUN_USER=www-data export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=www-data And all files in /var/www are having these user/group: www-data:www-data Am I setting this correctly? What should I do to fix this problem?

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• How to select display to record in recordmydesktop

  - by Tom

  I have a dual monitor setup and wish to only record the 1st monitor with recordmydesktop, but I am unsure of the settings when doing it via the command line, so far I have this: recordmydesktop --display=1 --width=1920 height=1080 --fps=15 --no-sound --delay=10 But I get this error message: Cannot connect to X server 1 How do I find the right X server to connect to and are the rest of my settings correct? I'm using 11.04, cheers.

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• How to convert rmvb to mp4? (or, why ffmpeg doesn't work?)

  - by Tom Brito

  Hi, I'm trying to use this script to convert an rmvb video to mp4, but I'm having problems with the ffmpeg. In apt-get there's only ffmpeg0 and ffmpeg-dev, I installed both, but the script doesn't work, it's saying that ffmpeg was not found. Any hint on this? --update The script I'm talking about: #!/bin/bash tipo=$1 arqv=$2 resolucao=$3 tipoarq=$4 help() { clear echo "Convertor de Vídeos para MP4" echo "Parametro 1 = Tipo: (A - Arquivo/D - Diretório)" echo "Parametro 2 = Arquivo/Caminho" echo "Parametro 3 = Resolução" echo "Parametro 4 = Tipo de Arquivos de Entrada (rmvb, avi, mpeg)" } if [ "$tipo" = "" -o "$arqv" = "" -o "$resolucao" = "" -o "$tipoarq" = "" ]; then help; exit fi if [ "$tipo" = "D" ]; then count=`ls "$arqv"/*.$tipoarq | wc -l` else count=1 fi echo "$count arquivos encontrados para converter." x=0 while [ ! $x -ge $count ]; do x=`echo $x + 1 | bc` if [ "$tipo" = "D" ]; then nome=`ls "$arqv"/*.$tipoarq | head -n $x | tail -n 1` else nome=$arqv fi echo "Convertendo $nome ..." ffmpeg -i "$nome" -acodec libfaac -ab 128kb -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1200kb -mbd 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -s $resolucao "`echo $nome | sed "s/\.$tipoarq//g"`".mp4 done exit --update Using WinFF it gives: Unknown encoder 'libx264' I've installed both the existing packages libx264-67 and libx264-dev, but none solved. Looking for more alternatives...

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• What naughty ways are there of driving traffic?

  - by Tom Wright

  OK, so this is purely for my intellectual curiosity and I'm not interested in illegal methods (no botnets please). But say, for instance, that some organisation incentivised link sharing in a bid to drive publicity. How could I drive traffic to my link? Obviously I could spam all my friends on social networking sites, which is what they want me to do, but that doesn't sound as fun as trying to game the system. (Not that I necessarily dispute the merit of this particular campaign.) The ideas I've come up with so far (in order of increasing deviousness) include: Link-dropping - This is too close to what they want me to do to be devious, but I've done it here (sorry) and I've done it on Twitter. I'm subverting it slightly by focusing on the game aspects rather than their desired message. AdWords - Not very devious at all, but effectively free with the vouchers I've accrued. That said, I must be pretty poor at choosing keywords, because I've seen very few hits (~5) so far. Browser testing websites - The target has a robots txt which prevents browsershots from processing it, but I got around this by including it in an iframe on a page that I hosted. But my creative juices have run dry I'm afraid. Does anyone have any cheeky/devious/cunning/all-of-the-above idea for driving traffic to my page?

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• Obtaining a HBITMAP/HICON from D2D Bitmap

  - by Tom

  Is there any way to obtain a HBITMAP or HICON from a ID2D1Bitmap* using Direct2D? I am using the following function to load a bitmap: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd756686%28v=vs.85%29.aspx The reason I ask is because I am creating my level editor tool and would like to draw a PNG image on a standard button control. I know that you can do this using GDI+: HBITMAP hBitmap; Gdiplus::Bitmap b(L"a.png"); b.GetHBITMAP(NULL, &hBitmap); SendMessage(GetDlgItem(hDlg, IDC_BUTTON1), BM_SETIMAGE, IMAGE_BITMAP, (LPARAM)hBitmap); Is there any equivalent, simple solution using Direct2D? If possible, I would like to render multiple PNG files (some with transparency) on a single button.

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• How does one set up a MIDI keyboard

  - by Martin Owens -doctormo-

  I would like to set up my keyboard via my midi-sport 2x2, I've plugged everything in and even installed the midisport-firmware package which was not automatically installed for some reason. The goal is to have the computer produce a piano sound when keys of the keyboard are hit. If you can make this work without jack, that would be good too. Step by step instructions, the less complexity the better.

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• Privacy Protection in Oracle IRM 11g

  - by martin.abrahams

  Another innovation in Oracle IRM 11g is an in-built privacy policy challenge. By design, one of the many things that Oracle IRM does, of course, is collect audit information about how and where sealed documents are being used - user names, machine identifiers and so on. Many customers consider that this has privacy implications that the user should be invited to accept as a condition of service use - for the protection of both of the user and the service from avoidable controversy. So, in 11g IRM, when a new user connects to a server for the first time, they can expect to see the following privacy policy dialog. The dialog provides a configurable URL that the customer can use to publish the privacy policy for their IRM service. The policy might clarify what data is being collected and stored, what use that data might be put to, and so on as required by the service owner's legal advisers. In previous releases, you could construct an equivalent capability, and some customers did, but this innovation makes it much easier to do - you simply write a privacy policy and publish it as a web page for which the dialog automatically provides a link. This is another example of how Oracle IRM anticipates not just the security requirements of a customer, but also the broader requirements of service provisioning.

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• Unable to install Apache 2.2.22 in Ubuntu 12.04

  - by Martin Betz

  I am not able to install Apache 2.2 in Ubuntu 12.04. Here is a snippet from my console log (sorry, it is in German): apache2 : Hängt ab von: apache2-mpm-worker (= 2.2.22-1ubuntu1) soll aber nicht installiert werden oder apache2-mpm-prefork (= 2.2.22-1ubuntu1) aber 2.2.22-1ubuntu1.1 soll installiert werden ... That means like: apache2 depends from apa..worker, but that should not get installed OR from ap...prefork..ubuntu1, but ap...prefork..ubuntu1.1 should get installed. I have no idea how to tackle that issue..

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• SSW Scrum Rule: Do you know to use clear task descriptions?

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  When you create tasks in Scrum you are doing this within a time box and you tend to add only the information you need to remember what the task is. And the entire Team was at the meeting and were involved in the discussions around the task, so why do you need more? Once you have accepted a task you should then add as much information as possible so that anyone can pick up that task; what if your numbers come up? Will you be into work the next day? Figure: What if your numbers come up in the lottery? What if the Team runs a syndicate and all your numbers come up? The point is that anything can happen and you need to protect the integrity of the project, the company and the Customer. Add as much information to the task as you think is necessary for anyone to work on the task. If you need to add rich text and images you can do this by attaching an email to the task.   Figure: Bad example, there is not enough information for a non team member to complete this task Figure: Julie provided a lot more information and another team should be able to pick this up. This has been published as Do you know to ensure that relevant emails are attached to tasks in our Rules to Better Scrum using TFS.   Technorati Tags: Scrum,SSW Rules,TFS 2010

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• Web developer has become uncooperative, what should we do to rescue our site? [closed]

  - by TOM

  What can an individual or a company do if the web designer who has designed their website becomes completely uncooperative? In our case He refuses to meet with us for discussions. He refuses to give us training on the effective use and management of the website he has designed for us (and has been paid in full for) despite this training being part of the original contract. Last year he disappeared for a number of months ,refused to answer emails or phobe calls and was totally unavailable to help us He refuses to give us the details of the hosting of our website. We have totally lost faith in this arrogant and unreasonable guy and would like to break off all relationships with him but ,it appears, he's got us over a barell

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• What do I do if a user uploads child pornography?

  - by Tom Marthenal

  If my website allows uploading images (which are not moderated), what action do I take if a user uploads child pornography? I already make it easy to report images, and have never had this problem before, but am wondering what the appropriate response is. My initial thought is to: Immediately delete (not just make inaccessible) the image File a report with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children with all information I have on the user (IP, URL, user-agent, etc.), identifying myself as the website operator and providing contact information Check any other images uploaded by that IP user and prevent them from uploading in the future (this is impossible, but I can at least block their account). This seems like a good way to be responsible in reporting, but does this satisfy all of my legal and moral responsibilities? Would it be better not to delete the image and to just make it inaccessible, so that it can be sent to the National Center for Missing & Exploted Children, the police, FBI, etc?

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• Highly SEO optimised forum posts

  - by Tom Gullen

  Given the following forum post: Basics of how internals of Construct work I've used GameMaker in the past. And I know some C++ and have used a few 3d engines with it. I have also looked at Unity, though I didn't get too much into it. So I know my way around programming etc... My question is, how does construct work internally? I know it allows python scripting, which itself is "technically" interpreted, though python is pretty fast as far as being interpreted goes. But what about the rest? Is the executable that gets cre... The forum software will take the first 150 chars of the first post as the page meta description, and the title will be the thread title. All ok. So in Google it will appear as: Basics of how internals of Construct work I've used GameMaker in the past. And I know some C++ and have used a few 3d engines with it. I have also looked at Unity, though I didn't get too much... http://www.domain.com/forum/basics-of-how-internals-of-construct-work.html Now the problem is (not so much with this thread, but other ones) is the first 150 chars don't always create the best meta description. Is it worth my time to cherry pick threads and manually set their description/title tags so they read like: Internal workings of Construct 2 Events aren't converted to any other language. The runtime is a standalone compiled EXE application, which is optimised and actually very fast. Your events... http://www.domain.com/forum/basics-of-how-internals-of-construct-work.html The H1 on the page is still the original title, but we have overridden the title and description to look more friendly on search results. Is this advantageous forgetting the obvious time cost?

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• Removing date from Google SERP

  - by Tom Gullen

  We are going through our site analysing the SEO. I find that sometimes on a google results page, some results show a date, others don't. Example (from same query): I prefer the result not to have the date in it, as 20 Oct 2009 probably has an adverse effect on the clickability of the result. Is this Google putting it in? Or the page itself? Or a combination of both (IE, if over a certain age, it includes date). The two URLs are: http://www.scirra.com/forum/perlin-noise-plugin_topic38498.html http://www.scirra.com/forum/dungeon-maze-generator_topic40611.html Any way to remove the dates? I'm thinking, if the age of the thread is 4 months don't display the date on the page, then Google might not find a date reference for it?

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• Scalable solution for website polling

  - by Tom Irving

  I'm looking to add push notifications to one of my iOS apps. The app is a client for a website which doesn't offer push notifications. What I've come up with so far: App sends a message to home server when transitioning to background, asking the server to start polling the website for the logged in user. The home server starts a new process to poll for that user. Polling happens every so many seconds / minutes. When the user returns to the iOS app, the app sends a message to the home server to stop polling. The home server kills the process polling for the user. Repeat. The problem is that this soon becomes stupid: 100s of users means 100s of different processes. It's just not scalable in the slighest. What I've written so far is in PHP, using CURL to do the polling and I started with PHP a few days ago, so maybe I'm missing something obvious that could help me with this. Some advice would be great.

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• Access Control and Accessibility in Oracle IRM 11g

  - by martin.abrahams

  A recurring theme you'll find throughout this blog is that IRM needs to balance security with usability and manageability. One of the innovations in Oracle IRM 11g typifies this, as we have introduced a new right that may be included in any role - Accessibility. When creating or modifying a role, you simply select Accessibility along with Open, Print, Edit or whatever rights you want to include in the role. You might, for example, have parallel roles of Reader and Reader with Accessibility and Contributor and Contributor with Accessibility. The effect of the Accessibility right is to relax some of the protection of content in use such that selected users can use accessibility tools. For example, a user with the Accessibility right would be able to use the screen magnification tool, which IRM would ordinarily prevent because it involves screen capture. This new right makes it easy for you to apply security to documents yet, subject to suitable approval processes, cater for the fact that a subset of users might be disproportionately inconvenienced by some of the normal usage constraints. Rather than make those users put up with the restrictions, or perhaps exempt them from using sealed documents altogether, this new right allows you to accommodate them in a controlled manner, and to balance security with corporate accessibility goals.

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• Programa Talleres FMW Junio 2010

  - by [email protected]

    PROGRAMA TALLERES FMW Junio 2010 Enterprise 2.0 TALLER FECHA LOCALIZACIÓN Gestion de Contenidos Web y Portales (UCM + WC Suite) 08/06/10 Madrid Digitalización (IPM) 09/06/10 Madrid Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) TALLER FECHA LOCALIZACIÓN Automatización de Procesos de Negocio con Oracle BPM 01/06/10 Madrid Oracle WebLogic 17/06/10 Madrid Inscribirse:

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• Validating allowed characters or validating disallowed characters

  - by Tom

  I've always validated my user input based on a list of valid/allowed characters, rather than a list of invalid/disallowed characters (or simply no validation). It's just a habit I picked up, probably on this site and I've never really questioned it until now. It makes sense if you wish to, say, validate a phone number, or validate an area code, however recently I've realised I'm also validating input such as Bio Text fields, User Comments, etc. for which the input has no solid syntax. The main advantage has always seemed to be: Validating allowed chars reduces the risk of you missing a potentially malicious character, but increases the risk the of you not allowing a character which the user may want to use. The former is more important. But, providing I am correctly preventing SQL Injection (with prepared statements) and also escaping output, is there any need for this extra barrier of protection? It seems to me as if I am just allowing practically every character on the keyboard, and am forgetting to allow some common characters. Is there an accepted practice for this situation? Or am I missing something obvious? Thanks.

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• Why do my Google sitelinks show gibberish for a PDF link?

  - by Tom

  I have a website which Google lists nicely along with site links. One of the site links - to a PDF file - shows un-human gibberish e.g 67,8;45:: 56 83 @7<1. (7/0;,*;: /59( (7/0;,;<7, <7)(60:4 (9<7 /+ +2, VU I thought it might be due to the PDF's title property so I changed it. But there hasn't been an improvement to the site link. Other PDF site links are fine and display the title property as desired. Does anyone know how I might rectify this problem or what might be the cause? My uninformed guess is it's some transliteration problem between code and display text which, I suppose, means I ought to recondition the PDF file in some way. Not sure how.

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• How do you turn a cube into a sphere?

  - by Tom Dalling

  I'm trying to make a quad sphere based on an article, which shows results like this: I can generate a cube correctly: But when I convert all the points according to this formula (from the page linked above): x = x * sqrtf(1.0 - (y*y/2.0) - (z*z/2.0) + (y*y*z*z/3.0)); y = y * sqrtf(1.0 - (z*z/2.0) - (x*x/2.0) + (z*z*x*x/3.0)); z = z * sqrtf(1.0 - (x*x/2.0) - (y*y/2.0) + (x*x*y*y/3.0)); My sphere looks like this: As you can see, the edges of the cube still poke out too far. The cube ranges from -1 to +1 on all axes, like the article says. Any ideas what is wrong?

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• How Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server enable Compliance

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  One of the things that makes Team Foundation Server (TFS) the most powerful Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform is the traceability it provides to those that use it. This traceability is crucial to enable many companies to adhere to many of the Compliance regulations to which they are bound (e.g. CFR 21 Part 11 or Sarbanes–Oxley.)   From something as simple as relating Tasks to Check-in’s or being able to see the top 10 files in your codebase that are causing the most Bugs, to identifying which Bugs and Requirements are in which Release. All that information is available and more in TFS. Although all of this tradability is available within TFS you do need to understand that it is not for free. Well… I say that, but if you are using TFS properly you will have this information with no additional work except for firing up the reporting. Using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server you can relate every line of code changes all the way up to requirements and back down through Test Cases to the Test Results. Figure: The only thing missing is Build In order to build the relationship model below we need to examine how each of the relationships get there. Each member of your team from programmer to tester and Business Analyst to Business have their roll to play to knit this together. Figure: The relationships required to make this work can get a little confusing If Build is added to this to relate Work Items to Builds and with knowledge of which builds are in which environments you can easily identify what is contained within a Release. Figure: How are things progressing Along with the ability to produce the progress and trend reports the tractability that is built into TFS can be used to fulfil most audit requirements out of the box, and augmented to fulfil the rest. In order to understand the relationships, lets look at each of the important Artifacts and how they are associated with each other… Requirements – The root of all knowledge Requirements are the thing that the business cares about delivering. These could be derived as User Stories or Business Requirements Documents (BRD’s) but they should be what the Business asks for. Requirements can be related to many of the Artifacts in TFS, so lets look at the model: Figure: If the centre of the world was a requirement We can track which releases Requirements were scheduled in, but this can change over time as more details come to light. Figure: Who edited the Requirement and when There is also the ability to query Work Items based on the History of changed that were made to it. This is particularly important with Requirements. It might not be enough to say what Requirements were completed in a given but also to know which Requirements were ever assigned to a particular release. Figure: Some magic required, but result still achieved As an augmentation to this it is also possible to run a query that shows results from the past, just as if we had a time machine. You can take any Query in the system and add a “Asof” clause at the end to query historical data in the operational store for TFS. select <fields> from WorkItems [where <condition>] [order by <fields>] [asof <date>] Figure: Work Item Query Language (WIQL) format In order to achieve this you do need to save the query as a *.wiql file to your local computer and edit it in notepad, but one imported into TFS you run it any time you want. Figure: Saving Queries locally can be useful All of these Audit features are available throughout the Work Item Tracking (WIT) system within TFS. Tasks – Where the real work gets done Tasks are the work horse of the development team, but they only as useful as Excel if you do not relate them properly to other Artifacts. Figure: The Task Work Item Type has its own relationships Requirements should be broken down into Tasks that the development team work from to build what is required by the business. This may be done by a small dedicated group or by everyone that will be working on the software team but however it happens all of the Tasks create should be a Child of a Requirement Work Item Type. Figure: Tasks are related to the Requirement Tasks should be used to track the day-to-day activities of the team working to complete the software and as such they should be kept simple and short lest developers think they are more trouble than they are worth. Figure: Task Work Item Type has a narrower purpose Although the Task Work Item Type describes the work that will be done the actual development work involves making changes to files that are under Source Control. These changes are bundled together in a single atomic unit called a Changeset which is committed to TFS in a single operation. During this operation developers can associate Work Item with the Changeset. Figure: Tasks are associated with Changesets   Changesets – Who wrote this crap Changesets themselves are just an inventory of the changes that were made to a number of files to complete a Task. Figure: Changesets are linked by Tasks and Builds   Figure: Changesets tell us what happened to the files in Version Control Although comments can be changed after the fact, the inventory and Work Item associations are permanent which allows us to Audit all the way down to the individual change level. Figure: On Check-in you can resolve a Task which automatically associates it Because of this we can view the history on any file within the system and see how many changes have been made and what Changesets they belong to. Figure: Changes are tracked at the File level What would be even more powerful would be if we could view these changes super imposed over the top of the lines of code. Some people call this a blame tool because it is commonly used to find out which of the developers introduced a bug, but it can also be used as another method of Auditing changes to the system. Figure: Annotate shows the lines the Annotate functionality allows us to visualise the relationship between the individual lines of code and the Changesets. In addition to this you can create a Label and apply it to a version of your version control. The problem with Label’s is that they can be changed after they have been created with no tractability. This makes them practically useless for any sort of compliance audit. So what do you use? Branches – And why we need them Branches are a really powerful tool for development and release management, but they are most important for audits. Figure: One way to Audit releases The R1.0 branch can be created from the Label that the Build creates on the R1 line when a Release build was created. It can be created as soon as the Build has been signed of for release. However it is still possible that someone changed the Label between this time and its creation. Another better method can be to explicitly link the Build output to the Build. Builds – Lets tie some more of this together Builds are the glue that helps us enable the next level of tractability by tying everything together. Figure: The dashed pieces are not out of the box but can be enabled When the Build is called and starts it looks at what it has been asked to build and determines what code it is going to get and build. Figure: The folder identifies what changes are included in the build The Build sets a Label on the Source with the same name as the Build, but the Build itself also includes the latest Changeset ID that it will be building. At the end of the Build the Build Agent identifies the new Changesets it is building by looking at the Check-ins that have occurred since the last Build. Figure: What changes have been made since the last successful Build It will then use that information to identify the Work Items that are associated with all of the Changesets Changesets are associated with Build and change the “Integrated In” field of those Work Items . Figure: Find all of the Work Items to associate with The “Integrated In” field of all of the Work Items identified by the Build Agent as being integrated into the completed Build are updated to reflect the Build number that successfully integrated that change. Figure: Now we know which Work Items were completed in a build Now that we can link a single line of code changed all the way back through the Task that initiated the action to the Requirement that started the whole thing and back down to the Build that contains the finished Requirement. But how do we know wither that Requirement has been fully tested or even meets the original Requirements? Test Cases – How we know we are done The only way we can know wither a Requirement has been completed to the required specification is to Test that Requirement. In TFS there is a Work Item type called a Test Case Test Cases enable two scenarios. The first scenario is the ability to track and validate Acceptance Criteria in the form of a Test Case. If you agree with the Business a set of goals that must be met for a Requirement to be accepted by them it makes it both difficult for them to reject a Requirement when it passes all of the tests, but also provides a level of tractability and validation for audit that a feature has been built and tested to order. Figure: You can have many Acceptance Criteria for a single Requirement It is crucial for this to work that someone from the Business has to sign-off on the Test Case moving from the  “Design” to “Ready” states. The Second is the ability to associate an MS Test test with the Test Case thereby tracking the automated test. This is useful in the circumstance when you want to Track a test and the test results of a Unit Test designed to test the existence of and then re-existence of a a Bug. Figure: Associating a Test Case with an automated Test Although it is possible it may not make sense to track the execution of every Unit Test in your system, there are many Integration and Regression tests that may be automated that it would make sense to track in this way. Bug – Lets not have regressions In order to know wither a Bug in the application has been fixed and to make sure that it does not reoccur it needs to be tracked. Figure: Bugs are the centre of their own world If the fix to a Bug is big enough to require that it is broken down into Tasks then it is probably a Requirement. You can associate a check-in with a Bug and have it tracked against a Build. You would also have one or more Test Cases to prove the fix for the Bug. Figure: Bugs have many associations This allows you to track Bugs / Defects in your system effectively and report on them. Change Request – I am not a feature In the CMMI Process template Change Requests can also be easily tracked through the system. In some cases it can be very important to track Change Requests separately as an Auditor may want to know what was changed and who authorised it. Again and similar to Bugs, if the Change Request is big enough that it would require to be broken down into Tasks it is in reality a new feature and should be tracked as a Requirement. Figure: Make sure your Change Requests only Affect Requirements and not rewrite them Conclusion Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server together provide an exceptional Application Lifecycle Management platform that can help your team comply with even the harshest of Compliance requirements while still enabling them to be Agile. Most Audits are heavy on required documentation but most of that information is captured for you as long a you do it right. You don’t even need every team member to understand it all as each of the Artifacts are relevant to a different type of team member. Business Analysts manage Requirements and Change Requests Programmers manage Tasks and check-in against Change Requests and Bugs Testers manage Bugs and Test Cases Build Masters manage Builds Although there is some crossover there are still rolls or “hats” that are worn. Do you thing this is all achievable? Have I missed anything that you think should be there?

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• Recover files from NTFS drive with bad sectors

  - by Martin

  A few nights ago I have created a backup of my data on an external 500 GB NTFS USB hard drive. I have then formatted my computer, reinstalled Ubuntu and started transferring back the data from the external HDD. Unfortunately some files have became corrupted and Ubuntu is unable to copy them over. The same issue happens if I login using Windows 7. Disk Utility detects with SMART that there are "a few bad sectors". Some of files are perfectly intact, but other files cannot be accessed (nor read, copied...) although they are displayed within nautilus and show the correct file size. Is there anything I can do to recover this data? I have thought of using TestDisk but this utility seems more useful for repairing lost partitions or deleted files. I have also thought of using ddrescue so I could at least have a low level copy of the disk but I am not sure what use to make of it in order to recover the data!!!

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• What's a good 2D animation program for Linux (an alternative for e.g. Flash CS)?

  - by Martin Zeltin

  I don't mean the flash player here, I'm talking about the flash program that i can make animations with. Like Adoble Flash CS (formerly known as Macromedia flash). Is there a program on linux that i can make animations? I want to make a movie like animator vs animation. I used easy gif animator on windows lol it was a bit harder than flash but i'm on linux and I'd like to know what it has to offer. Worse case scenario, what gif animators are there on linux. :) Thanks!

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