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New “Scrum Master Skills” Course at Pluralsight
My new Scrum Master Skills course just went live on Pluralsight! Here’s the course description: The Scrum Master role in an organization can be difficult. You live between a rock and a hard place. You’re influential but you probably don’t have any real power. You’re not a project manager but you’re still kind of on the…
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Team Foundation Server 2015 (TFS2015) Installation Guide
[UPDATE 2/28/2017 — If case you need it, here’s the TFS2017 version of this guide.] Well, Team Foundation Server 2015 (TFS2015) RTM’d yesterday and it’s now ready for general use. Following on my tradition of writing an illustrated installation guide for TFS2010, TFS2012, and TFS2013, here’s my TFS2015 Installation Guide. Since this is the 1.0 version…
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VSLive SF 2015: ‘Better Unit Tests Through Design Patterns’ Slides & Code
As promised, here are the slides from the Better Unit Tests through Design Patterns: Repository, Adapter, Mocks, and more… talk that I did yesterday at VSLive San Francisco 2015. Here’s the abstract: You’re sold on unit testing. You’re even doing “test first” development – but there are always those nagging questions. How do your user interfaces fit into…
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VSLive SF 2015: Enterprise Git Slides
As promised, here are the slides from the Enterprise Git talk that I did with Ed Thomson yesterday at VSLive San Francisco 2015. Here’s the abstract: Git is all the rage. All the cool kids are using Git. They seem to like it a lot. They’re downright passionate about it. But is it right for your project? It’s…
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VSLive SF 2015: TFS Automated Build, Test, & Deploy
As promised, here are the slides and code samples from my Automated Build, Test & Deploy with TFS, ASP.NET, and SQL Server talk that I did today at VSLive San Francisco 2015. Here’s the abstract: Automatically building your ASP.NET code is easy. Create a TFS build and go. But what about the database code? How…
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VSLive SF 2015: Load Testing Slides & Code
As promised, here are the slides and code samples from my Load Testing ASP.NET & WebAPI with Visual Studio 2013 talk that I did today at VSLive San Francisco 2015. Here’s the abstract: It’s a common problem: you’re getting close to when you’re supposed to deploy your new ASP.NET application in to production and somehow…
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Slides: “Coaching Skills for Scrum Masters & The Self-Organizing Team” from ALM Chicago
I just wrapped up speaking at ALM Chicago 2015. (Had a great time, BTW.) As promised, here are my slides from my talk. Coaching Skills for Scrum Masters & The Self-Organizing Team Scrum works best with — arguably, requires — a self-organizing team. If you want a high-performing and self-organizing team, it helps if your…
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Zen & the Art of the Scrum Timebox
Everything that happens in Scrum happens within a ‘timebox’. There’s the 30 day (or less) overall Sprint and then there are timeboxes for the events within a Sprint. There’s 8 hours (or less) for the Sprint Planning Meeting. The Daily Scrum gets 15 minutes. Then 4 hours (or less) for the Sprint Review followed by…
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4 Ways to Fail at Scrum Planning Poker
If you’re doing Scrum, chances are high that you use or at least have heard of Planning Poker. (By my estimates, I’d say that somewhere between 0 and 100% of teams use it.) It’s a simple and effective way to do software estimation that’s easy to understand and implement. Considering how simple it is, you’d…
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A Quick Guide to Choosing Your Scrum Sprint Length
If your team is using Scrum to organize their work and deliver done, working software, you’ll be working in Sprints. A Sprint is the time you have to do your work. A Scrum Sprint goes like this: 1) at the start of the sprint you plan what you’re going to do and how, 2) go…