Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
I was in one of our team rooms the other day and found this written on one of the whiteboards "Nelly Threat Level: Orange". What's that all about?
Nelly is the team's lead writer. Most people on p&p teams pitch in to write documentation but she's the person who's actually responsible ...
Tags: agile, Proven practices
1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
What do managers do when their teams are using Scrum or some other agile approach to software development? The notion of managers as facilitators was really brought home to me by Diana Larsen in a talk at Agile 2007. Daily standup is one of the first places the rubber meets ...
Tags: agile, Proven practices, Scrum
3 Comments »
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
Postponed - Due to flooding, road closures and the impending end of life as we know it. We'll be rescheduling in April.
I'm speaking tomorrow night (8th Jan) at the South Sound .NET Users Group in Olympia on Continuous Integration and some of the tricks we've used at Microsoft to get ...
Tags: Continuous integration, Events, Proven practices, Seattle
1 Comment »
Monday, November 10th, 2008
One of the questions I got at the p&p Summit after my distributed agile development talk was, how do you use Microsoft Visual Source Safe (VSS) with distributed teams? This is an issue because VSS was never written with distribution in mind. The VSS client connects directly to the ...
Tags: Distributed teams, Events, Proven practices, Seattle, Tools, Visual Studio
2 Comments »
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
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 ...
Tags: Proven practices, Scrum
1 Comment »
Monday, September 29th, 2008
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 ...
Tags: agile, Large teams, Proven practices, Scrum
7 Comments »
Friday, September 19th, 2008
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 ...
Tags: Distributed teams, Proven practices, Scrum, Visual Studio
4 Comments »
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
I've added a page of slide decks for talks I've given over the past couple of years. I'll be adding more when I get more time.
Tags: Events, Proven practices
No Comments »
Thursday, August 7th, 2008
My talk on the patterns & practices Service Factory:ME team's experiences with Continuous Integration (CI) and our data analysis of the CI and Team Foundation Server logs is this morning at Agile 2008. You can find the presentation for this talk here:
One Hundred Days of Continuous Integration - slide deck
One ...
Tags: agile, Continuous integration, Distributed teams, Events, Microsoft, p&p, Proven practices, Static analysis, Toronto
1 Comment »
Friday, July 25th, 2008
Playing music in your team room? Who gets to pick it and for how long? Here's the "rules" we use in the patterns & practices team rooms:
Music rotates each hour
Everyone gets an hour to play the music they want
At the end of the hour someone else gets the next hour
At ...
Tags: agile, Proven practices
No Comments »
Welcome to my blog on software development and probably a whole lot more. If you're looking for alpine climbing you'll find it on my 
