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“Scrum Under a Waterfall” at ALM Chicago
I’m presenting my “Scrum Under a Waterfall” talk today (2/22/2012) at ALM Chicago. Here’s the abstract: It would be so easy if everyone at our companies just used Scrum — or at least Agile. No one would lean on the team for dates and deadlines, and everyone would know that change is a good thing. …
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TFS2010’s Stories Overview Report: What are “Test Points”?
I was visiting a new customer yesterday who is thinking of adopting Team Foundation Server 2010. Amongst other things, they asked me for an overview of the SQL Server Reporting Services Reports –- specifically, which reports are good for Project Managers. My first thought was the Stories Overview report. The Stories Overview report (see Figure…
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VSLive Redmond 2011 Slides and Sample Code for my Unit Testing & TFS2010 Build Sessions
I spoke at VSLive in Redmond, Washington last week and gave two talks: 1) “Team Foundation Server 2010 Builds: Understand, Configure, and Customize” and 2) “Design For Testability: Mocks, Stubs, Refactoring, and User Interfaces.” Here are the abstracts: Design for Testability: Mocks, Stubs, Refactoring, and User Interfaces You’re sold on unit testing. You’re even doing…
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Three possible causes for TFS to Project Server sync “failure”
If you didn’t know already, there is a connector from Microsoft that lets you synchronize work items in TFS with enterprise project plans in Microsoft Project Server. I’ve been working with this synchronization feature for a project that I’m doing and ran into a couple of “user error” problems. Put another way, everything was configured…
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Speaking at VSLive Redmond on October 20, 2011
Updated 10/24/2011: the slides and code samples for these talks are available here. FYI, I’ll be speaking at VSLive in Redmond, Washington on October 20th, 2011. While I’m there, I’ll be giving two talks: 1) “Team Foundation Server 2010 Builds: Understand, Configure, and Customize” and 2) “Design For Testability: Mocks, Stubs, Refactoring, and User Interfaces.”…
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Utility to Manually Refresh the TFS2010 Warehouse
Every once in a while, you may find that you need to manually refresh your Team Foundation Server 2010’s data warehouse. You’ll know you need to do that manual refresh when your TFS2010 reports start tossing off errors like “The Team System cube either does not exist or has not been processed” or “An error…
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SDTimes: “Moving software architects into the business analyst role”
I got interviewed for an article in SDTimes a while back and it just dropped. The article talks about the changing duties of the software architect with an emphasis on Scrum and Agile. (Thanks to Victoria Reitano for giving me a call.) August 8, 2011 — (Page 1 of 4) The role of the software…
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Workaround for TFS2010 MissingFieldException when attaching Team Project Collection
Summary: I was doing a Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS2010) migration project for a customer a few weeks ago and ran into problems when attempting to attach a migrated Team Project Collection (TPC). Although the customer assured me that the source instance of TFS2010 had never been attached to Microsoft Project Server, the collection contained…
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Article: Levels of Team Foundation Server 2010 Build Automation
My article discussing how to adopt Team Foundation Server 2010 build and the various levels of build “awesomeness” is up at VisualStudioMagazine.com. The basic gist is how to think about going from no automated builds to achievable levels of automated builds using Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS2010) and what that process would be. For TFS2010…
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Silverlight Coded UI Tests with UserControls & AutomationProperties
Summary: Silverlight Coded UI tests don’t work properly against UserControls unless you specify either AutomationProperties.Name or AutomationProperties.Id on the UserControl. (Thanks to Howie Hilliker @ Microsoft for his help figuring out this problem!) With the release of Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2, we now have the ability to create Coded UI Tests against our…