Agile Metrics: The Nelly Threat Level

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 ...

Scrum Daily Standup Meetings: A Manager’s Field Guide

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 ...

I’m Speaking at the South Sound .NET Users Group

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 ...

Visual Source Safe and Distributed Teams

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 ...

Managing Bugs with Scrum

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 ...