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  • Best setup/workflow for distributed team to integrated DSVC with fragmented huge .NET site?

    - by lazfish
    So we have a team with 2 developers one manager. The dev server sits in a home office and the live server sits in a rack somewhere handled by the larger part of my company. We have freedom to do as we please but I want to incorporate Kiln DSVC and FogBugz for us with some standard procedures to make sense of our decisions/designs/goals. Our main product is web-based training through our .NET site with many videos etc, and we also do mobile apps for multiple platforms. Our code-base is a 15 yr old fragmented mess. The approach has been rogue .asp/.aspx pages with some class management implemented in the last 6 years. We still mix our html/vb/js all on the same file when we add a feature/page to our site. We do not separate the business logic from the rest of the code. Wiring anything up in VS for Intelli-sense or testing or any other benefit is more frustrating than it is worth, because of having to manually rejigger everything back to one file. How do other teams approach this? I noticed when I did wire everything up for VS it wants to make a class for all functions. Do people normally compile DLLs for page-specific functions that won't be reusable? What approaches make sense for getting our practices under control while still being able to fix old anti-patterns and outdated code and still moving towards a logical structure for future devs to build on?

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  • One National Team One Event &ndash; SharePoint Saturday Kansas City

    - by MOSSLover
    I wasn’t expect to run an event from 1,000 miles away, but some stuff happened you know like it does and I opted in.  It was really weird, because people asked why are you living in NJ and running Kansas City?  I did move, but it was like my baby and Karthik didn’t have the ability to do it this year.  I found it really challenging, because I could not physically be in Kansas City.  At first I was freaking out and Lee Brandt, Brian Laird, and Chris Geier offered to help.  Somehow I couldn’t come the day of the event.  Time-wise it just didn’t work out.  I could do all the leg work prior to the event, but weekends just were not good.  I was going to be in DC until March or April on the weekdays, so leaving that weekend was too tough.  As it worked out Lee was my eyes and ears for the venue.  Brian was the sponsor and prize box coordinator if anyone needed to send items.  Lee also helped Brian the day of the event move all the boxes.  I did everything we could do electronically, such as get the sponsors coordinate with Michael Lotter on invoicing and getting the speakers, posting the submissions, budgeting the money, setting up a speaker dinner by phone, plus all that other stuff you do behind the scenes.  Chris was there to help Lee and Brian the day of the event and help us out with the speaker dinner.  Karthik finally got back from India and he was there the night before getting the folders together and the signs and stuffing it all.  Jason Gallicchio also helped me out (my cohort for SPS NYC) as he did the schedule and helped with posting the speakers abstracts and so did Chris Geier by posting the bios.  The lot of them enlisted a few other monkeys to help out.  It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, but it worked.  Around 100+ attendees ended up showing and I hear it was  a great event.  Jason, Michael, Chris, Karthik, Brian, and Lee are not all from the same area, but they helped me out in bringing this event together.  It was a national SharePoint Saturday team that brought together a specific local event for Kansas City.  It’s like a metaphor for the entire SharePoint Community.  We help our own kind out we don’t let me fail.  I know Lee and Brian aren’t technically SharePoint People they are honorary SharePoint Community Members.  Thanks everyone for the support and help in bringing this event together.  Technorati Tags: SharePoint Saturday,SPS KC,SharePoint,SharePoint Saturday Kanas City,Kansas City

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  • In a multidisciplinary team, how much should each member's skills overlap?

    - by spade78
    I've been working in embedded software development for this small startup and our team is pretty small: about 3-4 people. We're responsible for all engineering which involves an RF device controlled by an embedded microcontroller that connects to a PC host which runs some sort of data collection and analysis software. I have come to develop these two guidelines when I work with my colleagues: Define a clear separation of responsibilities and make sure each person's contribution to the final product doesn't overlap. Don't assume your colleagues know everything about their responsibilities. I assume there is some sort of technology that I will need to be competent at to properly interface with the work of my colleagues. The first point is pretty easy for us. I do firmware, one guy does the RF, another does the PC software, and the last does the DSP work. Nothing overlaps in terms of two people's work being mixed into the final product. For that to happen, one guy has to hand off work to another guy who will vet it and integrate it himself. The second point is the heart of my question. I've learned the hard way not to trust the knowledge of my colleagues absolutley no matter how many years experience they claim to have. At least not until they've demonstrated it to me a couple of times. So given that whenever I develop a piece of firmware, if it interfaces with some technology that I don't know then I'll try to learn it and develop a piece of test code that helps me understand what they're doing. That way if my piece of the product comes into conflict with another piece then I have some knowledge about possible causes. For example, the PC guy has started implementing his GUI's in .NET WPF (C#) and using LibUSBdotNET for USB access. So I've been learning C# and the .NET USB library that he uses and I build a little console app to help me understand how that USB library works. Now all this takes extra time and energy but I feel it's justified as it gives me a foothold to confront integration problems. Also I like learning this new stuff so I don't mind. On the other hand I can see how this can turn into a time synch for work that won't make it into the final product and may never turn into a problem. So how much experience/skills overlap do you expect in your teammates relative to your own skills? Does this issue go away as the teams get bigger and more diverse?

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  • In a multidisciplicary team, how much should each member's skills overlap?

    - by spade78
    I've been working in embedded software development for this small startup and our team is pretty small: about 3-4 people. We're responsible for all engineering which involves an RF device controlled by an embedded microcontroller that connects to a PC host which runs some sort of data collection and analysis software. I have come to develop these two guidelines when I work with my colleagues: Define a clear separation of responsibilities and make sure each person's contribution to the final product doesn't overlap. Don't assume your colleagues know everything about their responsibilities. I assume there is some sort of technology that I will need to be competent at to properly interface with the work of my colleagues. The first point is pretty easy for us. I do firmware, one guy does the RF, another does the PC software, and the last does the DSP work. Nothing overlaps in terms of two people's work being mixed into the final product. For that to happen, one guy has to hand off work to another guy who will vet it and integrate it himself. The second point is the heart of my question. I've learned the hard way not to trust the knowledge of my colleagues absolutley no matter how many years experience they claim to have. At least not until they've demonstrated it to me a couple of times. So given that whenever I develop a piece of firmware, if it interfaces with some technology that I don't know then I'll try to learn it and develop a piece of test code that helps me understand what they're doing. That way if my piece of the product comes into conflict with another piece then I have some knowledge about possible causes. For example, the PC guy has started implementing his GUI's in .NET WPF (C#) and using LibUSBdotNET for USB access. So I've been learning C# and the .NET USB library that he uses and I build a little console app to help me understand how that USB library works. Now all this takes extra time and energy but I feel it's justified as it gives me a foothold to confront integration problems. Also I like learning this new stuff so I don't mind. On the other hand I can see how this can turn into a time synch for work that won't make it into the final product and may never turn into a problem. So how much experience/skills overlap do you expect in your teammates relative to your own skills? Does this issue go away as the teams get bigger and more diverse?

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  • WCF: Serializing and Deserializing generic collections

    - by Fabiano
    I have a class Team that holds a generic list: [DataContract(Name = "TeamDTO", IsReference = true)] public class Team { [DataMember] private IList<Person> members = new List<Person>(); public Team() { Init(); } private void Init() { members = new List<Person>(); } [System.Runtime.Serialization.OnDeserializing] protected void OnDeserializing(StreamingContext ctx) { Log("OnDeserializing of Team called"); Init(); if (members != null) Log(members.ToString()); } [System.Runtime.Serialization.OnSerializing] private void OnSerializing(StreamingContext ctx) { Log("OnSerializing of Team called"); if (members != null) Log(members.ToString()); } [System.Runtime.Serialization.OnDeserialized] protected void OnDeserialized(StreamingContext ctx) { Log("OnDeserialized of Team called"); if (members != null) Log(members.ToString()); } [System.Runtime.Serialization.OnSerialized] private void OnSerialized(StreamingContext ctx) { Log("OnSerialized of Team called"); Log(members.ToString()); } When I use this class in a WCF service, I get following log output OnSerializing of Team called System.Collections.Generic.List 1[Person] OnSerialized of Team called System.Collections.Generic.List 1[Person] OnDeserializing of Team called System.Collections.Generic.List 1[ENetLogic.ENetPerson.Model.FirstPartyPerson] OnDeserialized of Team called ENetLogic.ENetPerson.Model.Person[] After the deserialization members is an Array and no longer a generic list although the field type is IList< (?!) When I try to send this object back over the WCF service I get the log output OnSerializing of Team called ENetLogic.ENetPerson.Model.FirstPartyPerson[] After this my unit test crashes with a System.ExecutionEngineException, which means the WCF service is not able to serialize the array. (maybe because it expected a IList<) So, my question is: Does anybody know why the type of my IList< is an array after deserializing and why I can't serialize my Team object any longer after that? Thanks

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  • Where can you find the Oracle Applications User Experience team in the next several months?

    - by mvaughan
    By Misha Vaughan, Applications User ExperienceNovember is one of my favorite times of year at Oracle. The blast of OpenWorld work is over, and it’s time to get down to business and start taking our messages and our work on the road out to the user groups. We’re in the middle of planning all of that right now, so we decided to provide a snapshot of where you can see us and hear about the Oracle Applications User Experience – whether it’s Fusion Applications, PeopleSoft, or what we’re planning for the next-generation of Oracle Applications.On the road with Apps UX...In December, you can find us at UKOUG 2012 in Birmingham, UK: UKOUG, UK Oracle User Group Conference 2012?December 3 – 5, 2012?ICC, Birmingham, UKIn March, we will be at Alliance 2013 in Indianapolis, and our fingers are crossed for OBUG Connect 2013 in Antwerp:? Alliance 2013March 17 - 20, 2013 ?Indianapolis, IndianaOBUG Benelux Connect 2013?March 26, 2013?Antwerp, Belgium?? In April, you will see us at COLLABORATE13 in Denver:? Collaborate13April 7 - April 11, 2013 ?Denver, Colorado?? And in June, we round out the kick-off to summer at OHUG 2013 in Dallas and Kscope13 in New Orleans:? OHUG 2013June 9 -13, 2013?Dallas, Texas ODTUG Kscope13?June 23-27, 2013 ?New Orleans, LA? The Labs & DemosAs always, a hallmark of our team is our mobile usability labs. If you haven’t seen them, they are a great way for customers and partners to get a peek at what Oracle is working on next, and a chance for you to provide your candid perspective. Based on the interest and enthusiasm from customers last year at Collaborate, we are adding more demo-stations to our user group presence in the year ahead. If you want to see some of the work we are doing first-hand but don’t have a lot of time, the demo stations are a great way to get a quick update on the latest wow-factor we are researching. I can promise that you will see whatever we think is new and interesting at the demo stations first. Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Apps UX DemostationFor Applications DevelopersMore and more, I get asked the question, “How do I build an application that looks like a Fusion?” My answer is Fusion Applications Design Patterns. You can find out more about how Fusion Applications developers can leverage ADF and the user experience best practices we developed for Fusion at sessions lead by Ultan O’Broin, Director of Global User Experience, in the year ahead. Ultan O'Broin, On Fusion Design Patterns Building mobile applications are also top of mind these days. If you want to understand how Oracle is approaching this strategy, check out our session on Mobile user experience design patterns with Mobile ADF.  In many cases, this will be presented by Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, Senior Manager of Mobile User Experiences, and in a few cases our ever-ready traveler Ultan O’Broin will be on deck. Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, on Mobile User Experience Design PatternsApplications User ExperiencesFusion Applications continues to evolve, and you will see the new face of Fusion Applications at our executive sessions in the year ahead, which are led by vice president Jeremy Ashley or a hand-picked presenter, such as one of our Fusion User Experience Advocates.  Edward Roske, CEO InterRel Consulting & Fusion User Experience AdvocateAs always, our strategy is to take our lessons learned and spread them across the Applications product lines. A great example is the enhancements coming in the PeopleSoft user experience, which you can hear about from Harris Kravatz, Senior Manager, PeopleSoft User Experience. Fusion Applications ExtensibilityWe can’t talk about Fusion Applications without talking about how to make it look like your business. If tailoring Fusion applications is a question in your mind, and it should be, you should hit one of these sessions. These sessions will be lead by our own Killian Evers, Senior Director, Tim Dubois, User Experience Architect, and some well-trained Fusion User Experience Advocates.Find out moreIf you want to stay on top of where and when we will be, you can always sign up for our newsletter or check out the events page of usableapps.

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  • What are some good questions (and good/bad answers) to ask at an interview to gauge the competency of the company/team?

    - by Wayne M
    I'm already familiar with the Joel Test, but it's been my experience that some of the questions there have the answers "massaged" to make the company seem better than it is. I've had several jobs in the past that, for instance, claimed they had a QA process and did unit testing, and what they really meant is "The programmers test the app, and test with the debugger and via trial-and-error."; they said they used SVN but they just lumped everything into one giant repository and had no concept of branching/merging or anything more complicated than updating and committing; said they can build in one step and what they really mean is it's "one step" to copy dozens of files by hand from the programmer's PC to the live server. How do you go about properly gauging a company's environment to make sure that it's a well-evolved company and not stuck on doing things a certain way because they've done it for years and they're ignorant of change? You can almost never ask to see their source code, so you're stuck trying to figure out if the interviewer's answer is accurate or BS to make the company seem good. Besides the Joel Test what are some other good questions to get the proper feel for a company, and more importantly what are some good and bad answers that could indicate a good or bad company? I mean something like (take at face value, please, it's all I could think of at short notice): Question: How does the software team apply the SOLID principles and Inversion of Control to their code? Good Answer: We adhere to SOLID wherever possible; we use TDD so it kind of forces us to write abstract, testable code. We use Ninject for our IoC container because it's fairly easy to configure - it was that or StructureMap but I find Ninject a bit more intuitive, and who doesn't like ninjas? You're not a pirate, are you? Bad Answer: Our code is pretty secure, yeah. And what's this Inversion of Control thing? I've never heard of it before. You see what I did there. The "good" answer uses facts to back it up and has a bit of "in crowd" humor; the bad answer shows complete ignorance of the question - not necessarily a bad thing if you are interviewing for a manger/director position, but a terrible answer and a huge red flag if you're interviewing as a developer and talking to a senior developer or manager! My biggest problem at the moment is being able to take a generic response and gauge whether it's the good or bad answer; more often than not it's the bad kind and I find myself frustrated almost from day one at the new job. I suppose I could name drop if I ask about specific things (e.g. "Do you write unit tests?" and if the answer is yes, ask if they use NUnit, MbUnit or something else; if they mention data access ask if they use a clean ORM like NHibernate or something more coupled like EF or Linq) but is there another way short of being resolute to actually call the interview on things (which will almost certainly result in not getting the job, but if they are skirting the question it's probably not a job I want).

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  • Upgrading from TFS 2010 RC to TFS 2010 RTM done

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    Today is the big day, with the Launch of Visual Studio 2010 already done in Asia, and rolling around the world towards us, we are getting ready for the RTM (Released). We have had TFS 2010 in Production for nearly 6 months and have had only minimal problems. Update 12th April 2010  – Added Scott Hanselman’s tweet about the MSDN download release time. SSW was the first company in the world outside of Microsoft to deploy Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server to production, not once, but twice. I am hoping to make it 3 in a row, but with all the hype around the new version, and with it being a production release and not just a go-live, I think there will be a lot of competition. Developers: MSDN will be updated with #vs2010 downloads and details at 10am PST *today*! @shanselman - Scott Hanselman Same as before, we need to Uninstall 2010 RC and install 2010 RTM. The installer will take care of all the complexity of actually upgrading any schema changes. If you are upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS2010 you can follow our Rules To Better TFS 2010 Migration and read my post on our successes.   We run TFS 2010 in a Hyper-V virtual environment, so we have the advantage of running a snapshot as well as taking a DB backup. Done - Snapshot the hyper-v server Microsoft does not support taking a snapshot of a running server, for very good reason, and Brian Harry wrote a post after my last upgrade with the reason why you should never snapshot a running server. Done - Uninstall Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 RC You will need to uninstall all of the Visual Studio 2010 RC client bits that you have on the server. Done - Uninstall TFS 2010 RC Done - Install TFS 2010 RTM Done - Configure TFS 2010 RTM Pick the Upgrade option and point it at your existing “tfs_Configuration” database to load all of the existing settings Done - Upgrade the SharePoint Extensions Upgrade Build Servers (Pending) Test the server The back out plan, and you should always have one, is to restore the snapshot. Upgrading to Team Foundation Server 2010 – Done The first thing you need to do is off the TFS server and then log into the Hyper-v server and create a snapshot. Figure: Make sure you turn the server off and delete all old snapshots before you take a new one I noticed that the snapshot that was taken before the Beta 2 to RC upgrade was still there. You should really delete old snapshots before you create a new one, but in this case the SysAdmin (who is currently tucked up in bed) asked me not to. I guess he is worried about a developer messing up his server Turn your server on and wait for it to boot in anticipation of all the nice shiny RTM’ness that is coming next. The upgrade procedure for TFS2010 is to uninstal the old version and install the new one. Figure: Remove Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server RC from the system.   Figure: Most of the heavy lifting is done by the Uninstaller, but make sure you have removed any of the client bits first. Specifically Visual Studio 2010 or Team Explorer 2010.  Once the uninstall is complete, this took around 5 minutes for me, you can begin the install of the RTM. Running the 64 bit OS will allow the application to use more than 2GB RAM, which while not common may be of use in heavy load situations. Figure: It is always recommended to install the 64bit version of a server application where possible. I do not think it is likely, with SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010  and even Windows Server 2008 R2 being 64 bit only, I do not think there will be another release of a server app that is 32bit. You then need to choose what it is you want to install. This depends on how you are running TFS and on how many servers. In our case we run TFS and the Team Foundation Build Service (controller only) on out TFS server along with Analysis services and Reporting Services. But our SharePoint server lives elsewhere. Figure: This always confuses people, but in reality it makes sense. Don’t install what you do not need. Every extra you install has an impact of performance. If you are integrating with SharePoint you will need to run this install on every Front end server in your farm and don’t forget to upgrade your Build servers and proxy servers later. Figure: Selecting only Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Team Foundation Build Services (TFBS)   It is worth noting that if you have a lot of builds kicking off, and hence a lot of get operations against your TFS server, you can use a proxy server to cache the source control on another server in between your TFS server and your build servers. Figure: Installing Microsoft .NET Framework 4 takes the most time. Figure: Now run Windows Update, and SSW Diagnostic to make sure all your bits and bobs are up to date. Note: SSW Diagnostic will check your Power Tools, Add-on’s, Check in Policies and other bits as well. Configure Team Foundation Server 2010 – Done Now you can configure the server. If you have no key you will need to pick “Install a Trial Licence”, but it is only £500, or free with a MSDN subscription. Anyway, if you pick Trial you get 90 days to get your key. Figure: You can pick trial and add your key later using the TFS Server Admin. Here is where the real choices happen. We are doing an Upgrade from a previous version, so I will pick Upgrade the same as all you folks that are using the RC or TFS 2008. Figure: The upgrade wizard takes your existing 2010 or 2008 databases and upgraded them to the release.   Once you have entered your database server name you can click “List available databases” and it will show what it can upgrade. Figure: Select your database from the list and at this point, make sure you have a valid backup. At this point you have not made ANY changes to the databases. At this point the configuration wizard will load configuration from your existing database if you have one. If you are upgrading TFS 2008 refer to Rules To Better TFS 2010 Migration. Mostly during the wizard the default values will suffice, but depending on the configuration you want you can pick different options. Figure: Set the application tier account and Authentication method to use. We use NTLM to keep things simple as we host our TFS server externally for our remote developers.  Figure: Setting your TFS server URL’s to be the remote URL’s allows the reports to be accessed without using VPN. Very handy for those remote developers. Figure: Detected the existing Warehouse no problem. Figure: Again we love green ticks. It gives us a warm fuzzy feeling. Figure: The username for connecting to Reporting services should be a domain account (if you are on a domain that is). Figure: Setup the SharePoint integration to connect to your external SharePoint server. You can take the option to connect later.   You then need to run all of your readiness checks. These check can save your life! it will check all of the settings that you have entered as well as checking all the external services are configures and running properly. There are two reasons that TFS 2010 is so easy and painless to install where previous version were not. Microsoft changes the install to two steps, Install and configuration. The second reason is that they have pulled out all of the stops in making the install run all the checks necessary to make sure that once you start the install that it will complete. if you find any errors I recommend that you report them on http://connect.microsoft.com so everyone can benefit from your misery.   Figure: Now we have everything setup the configuration wizard can do its work.  Figure: Took a while on the “Web site” stage for some point, but zipped though after that.  Figure: last wee bit. TFS Needs to do a little tinkering with the data to complete the upgrade. Figure: All upgraded. I am not worried about the yellow triangle as SharePoint was being a little silly Exception Message: TF254021: The account name or password that you specified is not valid. (type TfsAdminException) Exception Stack Trace:    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Management.Controls.WizardCommon.AccountSelectionControl.TestLogon(String connectionString)    at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.WorkerThreadStart(Object argument) [Info   @16:10:16.307] Benign exception caught as part of verify: Exception Message: TF255329: The following site could not be accessed: http://projects.ssw.com.au/. The server that you specified did not return the expected response. Either you have not installed the Team Foundation Server Extensions for SharePoint Products on this server, or a firewall is blocking access to the specified site or the SharePoint Central Administration site. For more information, see the Microsoft Web site (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161206). (type TeamFoundationServerException) Exception Stack Trace:    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.SharePoint.WssUtilities.VerifyTeamFoundationSharePointExtensions(ICredentials credentials, Uri url)    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Admin.VerifySharePointSitesUrl.Verify() Inner Exception Details: Exception Message: TF249064: The following Web service returned an response that is not valid: http://projects.ssw.com.au/_vti_bin/TeamFoundationIntegrationService.asmx. This Web service is used for the Team Foundation Server Extensions for SharePoint Products. Either the extensions are not installed, the request resulted in HTML being returned, or there is a problem with the URL. Verify that the following URL points to a valid SharePoint Web application and that the application is available: http://projects.ssw.com.au. If the URL is correct and the Web application is operating normally, verify that a firewall is not blocking access to the Web application. (type TeamFoundationServerInvalidResponseException) Exception Data Dictionary: ResponseStatusCode = InternalServerError I’ll look at SharePoint after, probably the SharePoint box just needs a restart or a kick If there is a problem with SharePoint it will come out in testing, But I will definatly be passing this on to Microsoft.   Upgrading the SharePoint connector to TFS 2010 You will need to upgrade the Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies on all of your SharePoint farm front end servers. To do this uninstall  the TFS 2010 RC from it in the same way as the server, and then install just the RTM Extensions. Figure: Only install the SharePoint Extensions on your SharePoint front end servers. TFS 2010 supports both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.   Figure: When you configure SharePoint it uploads all of the solutions and templates. Figure: Everything is uploaded Successfully. Figure: TFS even remembered the settings from the previous installation, fantastic.   Upgrading the Team Foundation Build Servers to TFS 2010 Just like on the SharePoint servers you will need to upgrade the Build Server to the RTM. Just uninstall TFS 2010 RC and then install only the Team Foundation Build Services component. Unlike on the SharePoint server you will probably have some version of Visual Studio installed. You will need to remove this as well. (Coming Soon) Connecting Visual Studio 2010 / 2008 / 2005 and Eclipse to TFS2010 If you have developers still on Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 you will need do download the respective compatibility pack: Visual Studio Team System 2005 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 If you are using Eclipse you can download the new Team Explorer Everywhere install for connecting to TFS. Get your developers to check that you have the latest version of your applications with SSW Diagnostic which will check for Service Packs and hot fixes to Visual Studio as well.   Technorati Tags: TFS,TFS2010,TFS 2010,Upgrade

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  • Agilist, Heal Thyself!

    - by Dylan Smith
    I’ve been meaning to blog about a great experience I had earlier in the year at Prairie Dev Con Calgary.  Myself and Steve Rogalsky did a session that we called “Agilist, Heal Thyself!”.  We used a format that was new to me, but that Steve had seen used at another conference.  What we did was start by asking the audience to give us a list of challenges they had had when adopting agile.  We wrote them all down, then had everybody vote on the most interesting ones.  Then we split into two groups, and each group was assigned one of the agile challenges.  We had 20 minutes to discuss the challenge, and suggest solutions or approaches to improve things.  At the end of the 20 minutes, each of the groups gave a brief summary of their discussion and learning's, then we mixed up the groups and repeated with another 2 challenges. The 2 groups I was part of had some really interesting discussions, and suggestions: Unfinished Stories at the end of Sprints The first agile challenge we tackled, was something that every single Scrum team I have worked with has struggled with.  What happens when you get to the end of a Sprint, and there are some stories that are only partially completed.  The team in question was getting very de-moralized as they felt that every Sprint was a failure as they never had a set of fully completed stories. How do you avoid this? and/or what do you do when it happens? There were 2 pieces of advice that were well received: 1. Try to bring stories to completion before starting new ones.  This is advice I give all my Scrum teams.  If you have a 3-week sprint, what happens all too often is you get to the end of week 2, and a lot of stories are almost done; but almost none are completely done.  This is a Bad Thing.  I encourage the teams I work with to only start a new story as a very last resort.  If you finish your task look at the stories in progress and see if there’s anything you can do to help before moving onto a new story.  In the daily standup, put a focus on seeing what stories got completed yesterday, if a few days go by with none getting completed, be sure this fact is visible to the team and do something about it.  Something I’ve been doing recently is introducing WIP (Work In Progress) limits while using Scrum.  My current team has 2-week sprints, and we usually have about a dozen or stories in a sprint.  We instituted a WIP limit of 4 stories.  If 4 stories have been started but not finished then nobody is allowed to start new stories.  This made it obvious very quickly that our QA tasks were our bottleneck (we have 4 devs, but only 1.5 testers).  The WIP limit forced the developers to start to pickup QA tasks before moving onto the next dev tasks, and we ended our sprints with many more stories completely finished than we did before introducing WIP limits. 2. Rather than using time-boxed sprints, why not just do away with them altogether and go to a continuous flow type approach like KanBan.  Limit WIP to keep things under control, but don’t have a fixed time box at the end of which all tasks are supposed to be done.  This eliminates the problem almost entirely.  At some points in the project (releases) you need to be able to burn down all the half finished stories to get a stable release build, but this probably occurs less often than every sprint, and there are alternative approaches to achieve it using branching strategies rather than forcing your team to try to get to Zero WIP every 2-weeks (e.g. when you are ready for a release, create a new branch for any new stories, but finish all existing stories in the current branch and release it). Trying to Introduce Agile into a team with previous Bad Agile Experiences One of the agile adoption challenges somebody described, was he was in a leadership role on a team he had recently joined – lets call him Dave.  This team was currently very waterfall in their ALM process, but they were about to start on a new green-field project.  Dave wanted to use this new project as an opportunity to do things the “right way”, using an Agile methodology like Scrum, adopting TDD, automated builds, proper branching strategies, etc.  The problem he was facing is everybody else on the team had previously gone through an “Agile Adoption” that was a horrible failure.  Dave blamed this failure on the consultant brought in previously to lead this agile transition, but regardless of the reason, the team had very negative feelings towards agile, and was very resistant to trying it out again.  Dave possibly had the authority to try to force the team to adopt Agile practices, but we all know that doesn’t work very well.  What was Dave to do? Ultimately, the best advice was to question *why* did Dave want to adopt all these various practices. Rather than trying to convince his team that these were the “right way” to run a dev project, and trying to do a Big Bang approach to introducing change.  He would be better served by identifying problems the team currently faces, have a discussion with the team to get everybody to agree that specific problems existed, then have an open discussion about ways to address those problems.  This way Dave could incrementally introduce agile practices, and he doesn’t even need to identify them as “agile” practices if he doesn’t want to.  For example, when we discussed with Dave, he said probably the teams biggest problem was long periods without feedback from users, then finding out too late that the software is not going to meet their needs.  Rather than Dave jumping right to introducing Scrum and all it entails, it would be easier to get buy-in from team if he framed it as a discussion of existing problems, and brainstorming possible solutions.  And possibly most importantly, don’t try to do massive changes all at once with a team that has not bought-into those changes.  Taking an incremental approach has a greater chance of success. I see something similar in my day job all the time too.  Clients who for one reason or another claim to not be fans of agile (or not ready for agile yet).  But then they go on to ask me to help them get shorter feedback cycles, quicker delivery cycles, iterative development processes, etc.  It’s kind of funny at times, sometimes you just need to phrase the suggestions in terms they are using and avoid the word “agile”. PS – I haven’t blogged all that much over the past couple of years, but in an attempt to motivate myself, a few of us have accepted a blogger challenge.  There’s 6 of us who have all put some money into a pool, and the agreement is that we each need to blog at least once every 2-weeks.  The first 2-week period that we miss we’re eliminated.  Last person standing gets the money.  So expect at least one blog post every couple of weeks for the near future (I hope!).  And check out the blogs of the other 5 people in this blogger challenge: Steve Rogalsky: http://winnipegagilist.blogspot.ca Aaron Kowall: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/caffeinatedgeek Tyler Doerkson: http://blog.tylerdoerksen.com David Alpert: http://www.spinthemoose.com Dave White: http://www.agileramblings.com (note: site not available yet.  should be shortly or he owes me some money!)

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  • Forbidden Patterns Check-In Policy in TFS 2010

    - by Jaxidian
    I've been trying to use the Forbidden Patterns part of the TFS 2010 Power Tools and I'm just not understanding something - I simply cannot get anything to change as I try to use this! I'm using the version that was released recently (I believe April 23, 2010), so it's not an old version. First off, yes, I know it's regex based, so let's clear that doubt... I have tried to block the following scenarios: 1) I have modified all of my T4 EF templates to generate files named EntityName.gen.cs. I then attempted to prevent TFS from wanting to check those files in. I used the regular expression \.gen\.cs\z and it didn't change a single thing! I even tried it without the \z and nadda! 2) I don't want app.config and web.config files to be checked-in by default because we have these things stored into app.config.base and web.config.base files that our build scripts use to generate our per-environment app.config and web.config files. As such, I tried the following regexes and again, nothing worked! web\.config\z, app\.config\z, web\.release\.config\z and web\.debug\.config\z. What is it that I am screwing up with this?

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  • MSbuild task fails because "Any CPU" solution is built out of order

    - by Art Vandalay
    I have two solutions to build in Teambuild, one is the application itself, the other one is the WiX installer. I want to build the application using "Any CPU" build configuration and the installer using "x86". I've listed the "Any CPU" solution first in my project file, but Teambuild always builds the "x86" solution first. I'm setting BuildSolutionsInParallel = false, but it still builds the solutions in the reverse listed order. If I change the first solution to "Mixed Platform", it works fine. How can I get the solutions to build in the order listed in the project file? <Project ...> <PropertyGroup> <!-- We want to build the install solution after the build solution --> <BuildSolutionsInParallel>false</BuildSolutionsInParallel> </PropertyGroup> <ItemGroup> <SolutionToBuild Include="$(BuildProjectFolderPath)/Pricer/Pricer.sln"> <Targets></Targets> <Properties></Properties> </SolutionToBuild> <SolutionToBuild Include="$(BuildProjectFolderPath)/Pricer/Pricer.Install/Pricer.Install.sln"> <Targets></Targets> <Properties></Properties> </SolutionToBuild> </ItemGroup> <ItemGroup> <ConfigurationToBuild Include="Release|Any CPU"> <FlavorToBuild>Release</FlavorToBuild> <PlatformToBuild>Any CPU</PlatformToBuild> </ConfigurationToBuild> <ConfigurationToBuild Include="Release|x86"> <FlavorToBuild>Release</FlavorToBuild> <PlatformToBuild>x86</PlatformToBuild> </ConfigurationToBuild> </ItemGroup> </Project>

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  • Change Comes from Within

    - by John K. Hines
    I am in the midst of witnessing a variety of teams moving away from Scrum. Some of them are doing things like replacing Scrum terms with more commonly understood terminology. Mainly they have gone back to using industry standard terms and more traditional processes like the RAPID decision making process. For example: Scrum Master becomes Project Lead. Scrum Team becomes Project Team. Product Owner becomes Stakeholders. I'm actually quite sad to see this happening, but I understand that Scrum is a radical change for most organizations. Teams are slowly but surely moving away from Scrum to a process that non-software engineers can understand and follow. Some could never secure the education or personnel (like a Product Owner) to get the whole team engaged. And many people with decision-making authority do not see the value in Scrum besides task planning and tracking. You see, Scrum cannot be mandated. No one can force a team to be Agile, collaborate, continuously improve, and self-reflect. Agile adoptions must start from a position of mutual trust and willingness to change. And most software teams aren't like that. Here is my personal epiphany from over a year of attempting to promote Agile on a small development team: The desire to embrace Agile methodologies must come from each and every member of the team. If this desire does not exist - if the team is satisfied with its current process, if the team is not motivated to improve, or if the team is afraid of change - the actual demonstration of all the benefits prescribed by Agile and Scrum will take years. I've read some blog posts lately that criticise Scrum for demanding "Big Change Up Front." One's opinion of software methodologies boils down to one's perspective. If you see modern software development as successful, you will advocate for small, incremental changes to how it is done. If you see it as broken, you'll be much more motivated to take risks and try something different. So my question to you is this - is modern software development healthy or in need of dramatic improvement? I can tell you from personal experience that any project that requires exploration, planning, development, stabilisation, and deployment is hard. Trying to make that process better with only a slightly modified approach is a mistake. You will become completely dependent upon the skillset of your team (the only variable you can change). But the difficulty of planned work isn't one of skill. It isn't until you solve the fundamental challenges of communication, collaboration, quality, and efficiency that skill even comes into play. So I advocate for Big Change Up Front. And I advocate for it to happen often until those involved can say, from experience, that it is no longer needed. I hope every engineer has the opportunity to see the benefits of Agile and Scrum on a highly functional team. I'll close with more key learnings that can help with a Scrum adoption: Your leaders must understand Scrum. They must understand software development, its inherent difficulties, and how Scrum helps. If you attempt to adopt Scrum before the understanding is there, your leaders will apply traditional solutions to your problems - often creating more problems. Success should be measured by quality, not revenue. Namely, the value of software to an organization is the revenue it generates minus ongoing support costs. You should identify quality-based metrics that show the effect Agile techniques have on your software. Motivation is everything. I finally understand why so many Agile advocates say you that if you are not on a team using Agile, you should leave and find one. Scrum and especially Agile encompass many elegant solutions to a wide variety of problems. If you are working on a team that has not encountered these problems the the team may never see the value in the solutions.   Having said all that, I'm not giving up on Agile or Scrum. I am convinced it is a better approach for software development. But reality is saying that its adoption is not straightforward and highly subject to disruption. Unless, that is, everyone really, really wants it.

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  • How can I copy a TFS 2010 Build Definition?

    - by devlife
    Is there any way to copy a build definition? I work in a mainline source control methodology which utilizes many different branches that live for very short periods (ie. a few days to a week). I'd really like to copy a build template and just change the solution to build. Is there any way to do this?

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  • Can't check in due to conflicting changes

    - by themaninthesuitcase
    I have an issue that means I cannot check in changes even if I resolve the issues. I have removed a form from the solution then created a new form with the same name. Now when I go to check in the form I get the following error: Even if I mark all the conflicts as resolved the check in fails with the following error: All conflicts resolved but no files checked in due to initial conflicts. How can I get this to check in?

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  • Why does Tfs2010 build my Wix project before anything else?

    - by bwerks
    Hi all, A similar question was asked and answered about a year ago, but was either a different issue (everything was in beta) or misdiagnosed. It's located here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/688162/msbuild-task-fails-because-any-cpu-solution-is-built-out-of-order. My issue is that I have a wix installer project, and after upgrading to Tfs2010 on monday, the build fails on linking because it can't find the build product of the Wpf application in the project. After some digging, it's because it hasn't been built yet. Building in Vs2010 works as normal. The wix project is set to depend on the Wpf project, and when viewing Project Build Order in the IDE, everything looks as normal. The problem was originally encountered with only two platform definitions in the solution; x86 and x64. There are also two flavors, Debug and Release, and TFSBuild.proj is set to build all four combinations. There was no occurence of AnyCPU anywhere. Per the referenced question above, I tried changing the Wpf project to use AnyCPU so that it would be built first. At this point, the wix project used the exact configuration and the Wpf project used the flavor with AnyCPU. However, doing so didn't seem to change anything. I'm using the Tfs2010 RTM, Vs2010 RTM, and the most recent version of Wix, which at the time of this writing is 3.5.1602.0, from 2010-04-02. Anyone else running into this?

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  • Remote iPhone / xCode application development?

    - by ANE
    4 java developers are new to iPod Touch/iPhone app development. They have an idea for an app. They have never used Xcode or Macs before. Instead of spending money for a new iMac or Mac Mini for each of them, my boss would like to sell them a $999 Apple server, hosted at a facility connected a single T1 line, and have all 4 people work remotely in Xcode. Is this feasible? Is anyone doing anything like this? Specifically, is 1 T1 enough for realistic remote app development? Would they have to work in black & white via Logmein or Gotomeeting to get decent speed? Can four people work remotely together on an Xcode project at the same time? Do they absolutely need their own Macs to connect their iPod Touches or iPhones physically to, or can they connect to their existing PCs with iTunes and install their in-development apps that way?

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  • Tool to Create Annotated Directory Structure Documentation

    - by Millhouse
    I've got a moderately complicated application that has been developed primarily by me, and I'm getting ready to bring a few more developers in, and I'm thinking of various forms of documentation that might be helpful. I want to communicate information about the directory structure/layout of the project so the new guys will know where to look for things when they are getting started and as they add features, know where to put new files etc., so we can keep things organized and consistent. Is there any tool out there can create something a little more sophisticated than just a plain text document? I'm thinking of something that looks similar to Windows Explorer with a directory structure on the left in a panel and then when you click on a particular folder, you would be able to view some text or HTML that describes the folder in the right hand panel. Oh, and development will be done on Windows, but cross platform would be nice.

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  • Creative ways to punish (or just curb) laziness in coworkers

    - by FerretallicA
    Like the subject suggests, what are some creative ways to curb laziness in co-workers? By laziness I'm talking about things like using variable names like "inttheemplrcd" instead of "intEmployerCode" or not keeping their projects synced with SVN, not just people who use the last of the sugar in the coffee room and don't refill the jar. So far the two most effective things I've done both involve the core library my company uses. Since most of our programs are in VB.net the lack of case sensitivity is abused a lot. I've got certain features of the library using Reflection to access data in the client apps, which has a negligible performance hit and introduces case sensitivity in a lot places where it is used. In instances where we have an agreed standard which is compromised by blatant laziness I take it a step further, like the DatabaseController class which will blatantly reject any DataTable passed to it which isn't named dtSomething (ie- must begin with dt and third letter must be capitalised). It's frustrating to have to resort to things like this but it has also gradually helped drill more attention to detail into their heads. Another is adding some code to the library's initialisation function to display a big and potentially embarrassing (only if seen by a client) message advising that the program is running in debug mode. We have had many instances where projects are sent to clients built in debug mode which has a lot of implications for us (especially with regard to error recovery) and doing that has made sure they always build to release before distributing. Any other creative (ie- not StyleCop etc) approaches like this?

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  • C#, create virtual directory on remote system

    - by sankar
    The following code create only virtual directory on local system , but i need to create on remote sytem ..help me.. Thanks, Sankar DirectoryEntry iisServer; string VirDirSchemaName = "IIsWebVirtualDir"; public DirectoryEntry Connect() { try { if (txtPath.Text.ToLower().Trim() == "localhost") iisServer = new DirectoryEntry("IIS://" + txtPath.Text.Trim() + "/W3SVC/1/Root"); else iisServer = new DirectoryEntry("IIS://" + txtPath.Text + "/Schema/AppIsolated", "XYZ", "xyz"); iisServer.Dispose(); } catch (Exception e) { throw new Exception("Could not connect to: " + txtPath.Text.Trim(), e); } return iisServer; } public void CreateVirtualDirectory(DirectoryEntry iisServer) { DirectoryEntry folderRoot = new DirectoryEntry("IIS://" + txtPath.Text + "/W3SVC/1/Root", "XYZ", "xyz"); folderRoot.RefreshCache(); folderRoot.CommitChanges(); try { DirectoryEntry newVirDir = folderRoot.Children.Add(txtName.Text, VirDirSchemaName); newVirDir.CommitChanges(); newVirDir.Properties["AccessRead"].Add(true); newVirDir.Properties["Path"].Add(@"\\abc\abc"); newVirDir.Invoke("AppCreate", true); newVirDir.CommitChanges(); folderRoot.CommitChanges(); newVirDir.Close(); folderRoot.CommitChanges(); } catch (Exception e) { throw new Exception("Error! Virtual Directory Not Created", e); } } protected void btnCreate_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { try { CreateVirtualDirectory(Connect()); } catch (Exception ex) { Response.Write(ex.Message); } } protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { }

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  • Hiring a programmer: looking for the "right attitude"

    - by Totophil
    It's actually two questions in one: What is the right attitude for a programmer? How do you (or would you) look for one when interviewing or during hiring process? Please note this question is not about personality or traits of a candidate, it is about their attitude towards what they do for living. This is also not about reverse of programmers pet peeves. The question has been made community wiki, since I am interested in a good answer rather than reputation. I disagree that the question is purely subjective and just a matter of opinion: clearly some attitudes make a better programmer than others. Consecutively, there might quite possibly exist an attitude that is common to the most of the better programmers. Update: After some deliberation I came up with the following attitude measurement scales: identifies themselves with the job ? fully detached perceives code as a collection of concepts ? sees code as a sequence of steps thinks of creating software as an art ? takes 100% rational approach to design and development Answers that include some sort of a comment on the appropriateness of these scales are greatly appreciated. Definition of "attitude": a complex mental state involving beliefs and feelings and values and dispositions to act in certain ways; "he had the attitude that work was fun" The question came as a result of some reflection on the top voted answer to "How do you ensure code quality?" here on Stack Overflow.

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  • Resources for Customizing TFS Build 2010

    - by Vaccano
    I am looking to create a way to build my Legacy Delphi 5 and 6 apps via TFS Build (using TFS 2010). I was fairly dangerous with the MSBuild way of doing things and I think I can still do that, but I would like to get into the Work Flow way of doing it. Are there any resources out there that discuss customizing a TFS Build via Windows Work Flow? Especially how to override the solution concept and how to compile and report errors. Thanks for any info.

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