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Managing Bugs with Scrum

So building on my post from earlier this week - Scrum and Supporting Your Existing Products -and reflecting on an interesting thread I’ve been following here at Microsoft. I thought I’d write a bit about how to handle bugs on your current product development.

“We’re doing Scrum but we have a lot of postponed bugs.”

Heard that one in your team room? A postponed bug is a bug that the team isn’t fixing now but might fix later. As opposed to a bug that’s been marked “Won’t Fix” which means nobody has any intention of fixing it… ever.

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Tags: Best practices, Scrum
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Scrum and Supporting Your Existing Products

Bugs! How do you handle fixing bugs and enhancement requests on an existing release of your product while your team(s) are working on the next release? Typically as you start work on a new version of your product there will be bugs or enhancement requests coming in from users of the previous versions. Successful software teams are able to address both the needs of their customers using the current release and implement features for the next release to address future customer scenarios.

It’s important to note that this is different from fixing bugs on your existing work. Scrum teams usually fix bugs on the stories they are currently working on as part of being “done” within a sprint. Bugs found after the iteration are simply added to the product backlog and prioritized accordingly.

In the case of new product development and released product bugs things are a little less clear. How do you balance these two activities? There are really two options here. And having tried both of them I can say that they each have pros and cons.
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Tags: Agile, Best practices, Large teams, Scrum
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Windows Home Server and Squeezebox

So having got my home server up and running I finally got around to getting music streaming off it into my living room with a Logitech Squeezebox Duet.

First off this is not an appliance, it’s a science project, albeit a really good one. I spent a happy hour fiddling with MAC addresses and WEP keys to get everything up and running. It’s not something my mother would thank me for. There are a couple of gotchas I ran into setting it all up which I thought I’d share.

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Tags: Gotchas, Hardware, Squeezebox, Windows Home Server
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Peek Inside a Microsoft patterns & practices Team Room

Last week we did a video of the patterns & practices team spaces at Microsoft. This short video focuses on the team rooms and how we use some of their unique features as we develop our deliverables and work with distributed teams.

The video is now posted on Channel 9.

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Tags: Agile, Distributed teams, News & events
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Building a Green Windows Home Server: A Quieter Server

I did some more experimenting with this tonight and it turns out my choice of fans is pretty sub optimal. The principle cause of noise in this system in the CPU cooler and case fan. Getting these fans to run slower when they’re not needed is the key to making the system quieter.

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Tags: Hardware, Windows Home Server
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Smallest-Scale Commercially-Available Map

Many years ago, when I was doing astronomy, I used to work with Michael Merrifield. Recently I discovered he is now in the art business. The picture on the left is of his map of the universe sculpture. Michael uses a laser to engrave data from astronomical surveys into a 6cm (2.5″) glass cube. The result a map of the known universe showing its large scale structure with a scale of about a one to a billion billion billion. He holds the Guinness World Record for the smallest scale three dimensional map.

All this is all very well but why do you need one? It looks quite pretty and might convince your friends that you’re cleverer than they previously believed - intelligence by association. It’ll also come in handy should a passing alien need directions home.

You too can be the proud owner of a map. Visit the Crystal Nebulae web site and order yours.

In case you were wondering… No, Michael didn’t pay me to write this.

Tags: Trivia
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Microsoft PDC Agile Pre-Conference

This year at PDC 2008 we’ll be running an Agile Pre-Conference.

I’m not going to be there but p&p’s Grigori Melnik will be. He’ll be presenting this session with Mary Poppendieck. You can hear Grigori and Mary talking about who they are an how they got into Agile in this new Channel9 video. They also talk about what they’ll be presenting at the PDC.

Tags: Agile, News & events
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Visual Studio Team System and Scrum Task Boards

Teams at patterns & practices use Visual Studio Team System to run their projects. Here are a couple of approaches for getting a traditional Scrum or XP task board experience with Team System; creating paper task cards from Team System using Word’s mail merge feature and the Conchango Scrum for Team System virtual task board.

Creating task cards from Team System

What if your team wants to get that tactile experience of moving cards around a board to track progress during an iteration or sprint? The EntLib 4.1 team is doing just that. Their team is co-located here in Redmond and they are using Team System in conjunction with a task board in the team room.

On the left you’ll see the EntLib team at their daily standup meeting with a whole load of white task cards on the wall behind them.

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Tags: Best practices, Distributed teams, Scrum, Visual Studio
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Microsoft Virtual TechDays… The Aftermath

It was a little odd speaking to two hundred people in India via Live Meeting while actually sitting in a completely empty office in Redmond at 1am. The biggest thing you miss is any feedback from the audience. Are they bored or sleeping? Are they shaking their heads in disagreement? Did they laugh at your joke? You can’t tell any of this over Live Meeting.

It felt very weird. But as Hunter S. Thompson once said “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”.

People asked quite a lot of questions at the end which was great and stuck with me through some technical difficulties with the phone. But as a speaker it feels unnatural to say the least! Maybe one day I’ll get back to India and can speak in person.

This was doubly ironic seeing as the talk was on… you guessed it… Distributed agile development and for the most part I was talking about the importance of improving communication. The point being driven home by a series of dropped conference calls through the presentation. I guess now I know what being remote really means.

Why am I writing this and not sleeping? Well the Ade Miller - never fails - get hyped up on caffeine and sugar beforehand has some down sides with late night speaking. I’ll scrape myself off the ceiling in another half hour and go to bed.

Tags: Distributed teams, India, News & events
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I’m Speaking Today at Microsoft Virtual TechDays, India

Somewhat to my surprise it turns out that I’m speaking at the Microsoft Virtual TechDays, India. Also surprising is that “today” turns out to be a bit of a vague term. That’s 11:30pm Pacific time or 12:00 noon in India. Yes that’s right a midnight speaking engagement, not a great excuse for a trip to India. On the plus side it’s a virtual event so the link above takes you to a web page. Just install Live Meeting to attend.

Here’s the talk abstract:

Agile Patterns & Practices at patterns & practices

Microsoft’s patterns & practices group uses an agile software development approach to rapidly deliver guidance to our customers worldwide. Ade Miller, the Development manager at patterns & practices, discusses how we chose this approach. Ade will also cover some of the challenges when adopting agile and how patterns & practices overcomes these. Using agile on distributed teams is something patterns & practices deal with a lot and this will be covered in some detail as it is a common challenge effecting many teams today.

Turns out that this will be similar to the talk I gave at the p&p Summit and put online yesterday. I places more emphasis on distributed development based on the audience and some writing I’ve been doing for a white paper on distributed agile development. Once I’ve finished the deck I’ll try and re-post it if I make significant changes from the existing one.

Tags: Agile, Distributed teams, India, News & events, p&p
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