New VPC Image for TFS 2008 VSTS 2008

When I presented at teh Chattanooga user group the otehr night I spun up my VPC image with TFS 2008 and VSTS 2008 on it to run thru my demos before I started. It was then I rememberd that the image expired last week. I set back my system date to get thru the presentation with only one demo (the CI Build creation) bombing out due to the change. Looks like there is a new image out there that expires Dec. 31, 2008.

Chattanooga .NET User Group Presentation

Presented at the Chattanooga .NET User Group last night. I did my Scrum in TFS talk and the audience was very engaged. It was a good balance of using TFS to automate common, time consuming development tasks and pragmattic ideas on how to implement Scrum. Chattanooga has a great group and the facility was top notch. Thanks to Anthony Bowman for inviting me down!

Little Rock Tech Expo

Last Thursday I headed down to Little Rock, AR with John Kellar to speak at their Tech Expo 2008 conference. Terry and Larry who run the Little Rock .NET User Group did a good jump reviving the conference after a one year hiatus. Attendance was around 130 with 3 tracks in the morning and 2 tracks in the afternoon. The facility on the campus of University of Arkansas was great and the weather was perfect. I did two sessions, "Scrum in TFS" and "Zen and the Art of Customizing TFS". My Scrum in TFS presentation became more of a general session about adopting Scrum from the audience's questions. Other speakers included the fore mentioned John Kellar, Mike Neel, Wally McClure, Dave McKinstry, Todd Anglin, Randy Walker, Alan Stevens, and Raymond Lewallen. I had some good discussion with Dave around TFS/VSTS and Scrum that gave me some good ideas for some other more focused sessions. All in all it was a good time and I hope to speak again next year.

TFS/Scrum Resource Links

In order to decrease the size and length of my TFS/Scrum presentations I am removing the slides that list links to online resources. I am posting those links here and simply referring to them from a slide in the presentations now.



Scrum/Agile Links

• Scrum for Team System - One of the best TFS Project Templates for Scrum around. Created by Conchango in association with Ken Schwabber.


• Control Chaos - A good website for all things Scrum. Lots of whitepapers, books, and other resources.


• Scrum Alliance - Another good website for Scrum with a more community feel.


• Agile Management Blog - Aimed more at project manager types (or Scrum Masters), but has some good practical blog entries from David Anderson. This link is to his post about TFS and Agile processes.


• eScrum - Another TFS Project Template for Scrum.

Scrum/Agile Books

• "Integrating Agile Development in the Real World" by Peter Schuh - Good introduction to several agile methodologies (including Scrum).


• "Agile Project Management with Scrum" by Ken Schwabber - The de facto book on Scrum by one of its creators.


• "The Enterprise and Scrum" by Ken Schwabber - The companion for the book above that takes the Scrum ideas and applies the to large, enterprise level projects.


• "User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development" by Mike Cohn - Good introduction to using User Stories to gather and document requirements.

Team Foundation Server Resources/Tools

• MSDN TFS Site - The official Microsoft site for Team Foundation Server.


• TFS 2005 Power Tools - Tools for editing work item and process templates, check in policies, extended command line tools, build tasks. etc.


• TFS 2008 Power Tools - Mostly the same tools for 2005 ported to 2008.


• CodePlex - Tons of community created tools and guides for TFS including a migration tool, Subversion source control bridge, and more.


• Personify Design - Creators of TeamLook which adds TFS extensions into Outlook and TeamSpec which is similar to Rational's RequisitePro tool for maintaining links from Word documents to work items in TFS.


• TFS API MSDN Sample - Great sample project showing how to interact with the TFS API.

Team Foundation Server Blogs

• Buck Hodges - Lots of good information on TFS, third party tools, etc.


• Brian Harry - Some overlap with Buck Hodges' blog, but he also includes lots of statistics on their own implementation of TFS internally.


• Naren Datha - Several blog posts on TFS customization.

Team Foundation Server Books

• "Professional Team Foundation Server" from WROX - Good starter book that covers a wide range of topics.


• "Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server" by Microsoft - General guide for implementing. Lots of good practical examples. You can download it for free from CodePlex.

Conchango Scrum for Team System 2008 Plug In Beta 2

I recently posted that Conchango posted the beta for the second version of their scrum plug in for Team Foundation Server 2008. I have been using the new process template for my TFS/Scrum presentations and wanted to list a few of my favorite features:

• Use of Iterations for designating Sprints: Previously you entered a sprint number into Product Backlog Items (PBI) and Sprint Backlog Items (SBI) to designate what sprint they corresponded to. There was no real validation and it was a tenuous link at best. Now the TFS Iterations are used and it provides a more solid approach.
  
• User Stories in Product Backlog Items: The PBI template now supports the User Story motif with a specific field for the user story text and another for the acceptance criteria. Not that you could not have done this before, it is now just built in.
  
• Much Improved Project Portal: The project portal is much cleaner than the previous version and I love the built in Wiki. It would be nice to have the ability to add a link directly to Wiki items, but you can do this with Hyperlink links if you really want to.
  
• Bug Work Item: We created our own "Bug" work item in the previous version. Having a built in item for this makes reporting much easier out of the box.

I have also enjoyed several of the improvements to TFS 2008 including:

• Easier Build Type Creation: A new wizard makes creating a build type much easier. Things you used to have to man handle the XML build script to accomplish are now simple options in the creation wizard.
  
• Queued Builds: I hated getting the pop up telling me another build was already in progress and having to sit and wait for it to finish.
  
• Out of the box Continuous Integration (CI) support: What used to be several steps that included touching event subscriptions, filters, and web services is now a few options on the build creation wizard.
  
• Links in Web Access: There has never been a very good way to see the link relationships between work items, but now the views in the Web Access portal show a nice little plus icon so that you can drill down to related items. Very nice.
  

I am still in the honeymoon phase with these products and have not yet upgraded them in production, so I am sure there may be new issues lurking under the surface. So far I am pleased with the new features and upgrades.