I've seen Test Driven Development work, so why not adjust it slightly and have the attendees (who own the requirements after all) drive the presentation? Today, at the in-between conference (a.k.a. Microsoft Community Summit 2008), I did just that. I had the attendees drive my four hour presentation. I did this in the Open Space room, and it not only fit with the theme of that room, but it worked great!

As the attendees arrived, I handed them 3-5 3x5 cards - the cool ones from 3M that you can sort, stack, and stick to surfaces.

Here are the topics (backlog items) that they came up with:

• How do you customize work item types?
• (What) team size to justify the usage of Team System?
• What's new and improved in VSTS 2008 vs. VSTS 2005?
• Continuous Integration (x 3)
• What performance degradation (can occur) from extensive branching?
• Integration with external tools (e.g. Mercury Quality Center, Doors)
• TDD
• Multiple builds running at the same time
• How to limit CI build to only trigger when for certain check-ins (by location)
• Best practices
• How to customize Code Analysis
• What makes VSTS more beneficial than VS Professional?
• What is Team Foundation Server?

And my personal favorite:

• I'm here to see if you're a good presenter because my company is thinking of bringing you in for a day to teach the team.

For those of you who attended my talk, here's a link to my notes and my worst practices presentation.

In many Agile development processes, there exists the idea of THE BACKLOG. This is particularly true in Scrum, the methodology that originated the idea. The recipe from Scrum is a Product Backlog which contains all the requirements or features desired in the software being created.

The backlog items are organized in priority order, determined by the Product Owner (PO). The PO can use any criteria to prioritize the backlog items. Priorities may be driven by risk, return on investment, or client demand. No matter what technique is used, this prioritization is crucial to the use and effectiveness of the backlog.

This all works quite well in a  situation of a single team creating a single product. It even works well when we scale up a bit and have one team working on several products. It just becomes necessary for the two product owners to strike a bargain on how to share team capacity.

It turns out that scaling to even bigger scenarios with an Enterprise Backlog and many teams working from it presents some new challenges. In this model you manage all work in the enterprise in a single backlog. This immediately draws into question what the "real" backlog is. Backlog managers may be interested in a view of the backlog that shows the prioritized list of items for a particular system, a team, a product, a release, or some other grouping.It becomes quickly apparent there are many ways to "see" the backlog.

Which Backlog View Wins?

Obviously, a PO is primarily interested in the view that shows the backlog for a particular product. For a release manager, coordinating the overall release of a product suite, the view of items to be included across many products in a big release is the perfect view. If you are a project manager, interested in a theme of work that will affect many products (think the Smart Art feature in Office 2007), you are looking for the theme view. We can think of this problem as dimensions in a multidimensional cube if it helps you BI types.

With all these views of the backlog going on, and each one of theme prioritized from 1-n, which one is the actual backlog?

• Theme View
• System View
• Release Cycle View
• Scrum Team View
• Product View

The easy answer is, "They are all important, depending on who you are and what you are interested in." It is true, though, that two of these view are closer to reality than all the others. While most of these views represent what we hope will get done, 2 of them are just a bit closer to what will get done, or has been done.

The Scrum Team View

This view aggregates the work items into a collection that actually represents what the team will be doing. This is the backlog the team will use in Sprint planning as they plan an iteration of work. If you are a theme owner and your work items aren't showing up in the Scrum Team View, you're in trouble.

The Release Cycle View

This view (and an associated burndown chart) helps us see the reality of features that are scheduled for release and those that have been completed. This view represents the absolute reality of what we can tell the clients will be in the next release.

Just Get Them

The real truth is that all of the views really are important. The real challenge is in deriving the views in the first place. If you are trying to work with an Enterprise Backlog and haven't got a good model for segmenting it, you may soon find it unwieldy. Find the right view to help you interact with the requirements and make sure your backlog items provide the data needed to see it. Just remember the 2 views that live closer to where the rubber meets the road.

Let’s face it, going to technical conferences is good for your career, but it’s not a whole lot of fun. What you need is an outlet. You need to have fun. That’s where we step in.

Cheap beer and lousy pizza!

Microsoft is bringing back GeekFest! Join them at Howl at the Moon for a night of lousy pizza, cheap beer, dueling pianos, socializing and one wild rubber duck competition….yes, a rubber duck competition.

There is limited invitations available, so what are you waiting for? If you are attending the TechEd 2008 Developer Conference, you can pre-register here.

Register and pick up your "duck" ticket in the TechEd Technical Learning Center (TLC) at the Developer Tools & Languages (TLA) information desk. You must have a "duck" ticket to get into the party. One "duck" admits up to two people.

When:
Tuesday, June 3, 2008 from 7:00 PM -10:00 PM ET

Where:
Howl at the Moon, 8815 International Drive, Orlando, FL 32819

Ticketing:
You must have a "duck" ticket to attend the party. One duck admits two.

I recently ran into a problem with our new Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 instance running on Windows Server 2008. I'm running Windows Vista x64 on my laptop, which has been working very well. But, when I tried to download a file from this new SharePoint site, the download started OK but then stopped almost immediately, as if the connection was lost.

I did some searching around the web and came across this post. As it turns out Windows Vista can negotiate the TCP packet size with Windows Server 2008 to optimize download speed. Apparently my router (A NetGear FVS318) is throwing a wrench in the works by blocking the SYN packets used to negotiate packet size. Result: no download!

Fortunately the fix is very easy once the  problem has been identified. Just run a Command Prompt as Administrator, and paste this onto the command line:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

That did the trick for me! However, you may want to re-enable auto-tuning when connected to a router that handles SYN packets properly. To re-enable TCP auto-tuning, use this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal

To see the current TCP settings on your Windows Vista client, use this command:

netsh interface tcp show global

I expect some people to see this and say, "Hey, that's clever." I know that others will read this and think, "What a hack."

Whichever side you fall on, there is little debate that navigating Work Items in Team System via customizable queries can be a little frustrating at times. The rub is in the data matching and ensuring you have fields defined for all the data you want. Often, I want to work with a set of work items that seem to have little to do with each other and aren't tied together with a genuine data model.

For example, when my backlog of Product Backlog Items (PBLIs) has 300 work items in it, I want to take 5 of them into an estimation meeting. Or maybe I want to flag 10 of them as a group because they are related via a project that I cannot get to with Area or Iteration data.

The logical next question is, "Wouldn't it be great if I could tag a work item in TFS?"

Here's how I did it.

1. Add a custom field to every single Work Item type in my Team Project.
   
   This field is just a string and is not marked as reportable. I only need it available for queries. I added no custom rules for the field, it is just there if you want it, not required or managed as part of workflow.
2. Add a control (a long one) for the field on all the work item types. I put it right near the top to make it easy.
   
3. Tag away. As a best practice, I am advising users to treat space as a delimiter to make tag searching easier.
4. Create a custom team query that looks like this:
   
   This lets users get to a search fairly quickly inside VS, but the best thing is to create your own private tag searches and keep them around like this:
   
5. It  is much easier to get use out of this using Team System Web Access because the search feature will simply hit against tags.
   
   

I just had a meeting where we discussed setting up a TFS 2008 production server and I went through the system requirements with our system administrator. The focus was on groups needed in Active Directory, what software is needed on the server, things like that.

Here are some camera phone shots of the whiteboard during this discussion. Wow.

What's the takeaway from all this? PLAN YOUR IMPLEMENTAION DELIBERATELY. Stand up a research VM and play with it before you decide how you want to set up a production system.

Groups and Accounts to Create and Administer

Things to Install on the Server

Now that Team Foundation Server 2008 is out, the Visual Studio Team System product team is totally focused on the next version, known as Rosario. If the current release rhythm continues, Rosario is likely to be released in 2010 (Visual Studio 2005 was released in November 2005, and Visual Studio 2008 was released in November 2007).

The latest version of Rosario is now available for public download on the Microsoft download site. This version is called the April Community Technology Preview (CTP). It's called a CTP because the product is still under development. The CTP gives the development community an opportunity to see what's been produced so far and provide feedback. It's not called a Beta because the bits have not been as thoroughly tested. For this reason, Microsoft recommends that this CTP release not be used for any sort of production development.

The product team has made impressive progress so far. Rich Hundhausen and I got a sneak preview of this CTP a few weeks ago, and what I saw blew my socks off! Whereas the new features in Team Foundation Server 2008 focused mainly on improvements to build and version control, the main areas of focus for Rosario are project management, design and test (Although I'm interested in all things Team System, I'm somewhat partial to project management).

This April CTP is the third CTP release for Rosario. To see the features included in each release, as well as a slick way to download the beast, check out these posts from Jeff Beehler:

• August 2007 CTP
• November 2007 CTP
• April 2008 CTP (download this one!)

When creating a new Team Project in your Team Foundation Server, everything is nice and smooth right up until you get to the permissions of groups and individuals. This can be a real PITA because permissions must be set up in 3 separate places.

1. Team Project level permissions within TFS itself
2. The Share Point Portal site for the Team Project
3. The SQL Reporting Services site created to serve reports on the Team Project

If you have done a little forward thinking, you have Active Directory groups for the major role mappings you want to make in all three of these areas. This will make the task a little better, but by the time you've gotten through with your Reporting Services permissions, you start to wonder if you remembered all the right group permissions way back on the Team Project itself. You know that feeling, and by the time you've assured yourself all is well, 10 minutes have elapsed.

Enter the CodePlex project "Team Foundation Server Administration Tool". This handy little utility lets you see permissions for each group across all 3 areas all at once. There may be the occasional uncaught exception or UI oddity, but this beats the heck out of doing the job manually.

These early releases of Team Foundation Server do still have a few ugly little knots on their heads, and the open source community has really stepped in to smooth those knots out. This utility is one great example. For a more complete list of open source tools for Team System, check out http://widgets.accentient.com/. Thanks to Richard Hundhausen's for his excellent slide deck on Team System implementation anti-patterns which turned me on to this utility.