I've been working on some Microsoft Team Foundation Server (tm) (TFS) reports for a team at Microsoft. A report publishes the results of an MDX query. The latest report I have been working on is complex enough to need some VB code. There are lots of examples of how to pass the individual fields from the query to the VB code, but I had to search and interpolate to come up with how to pass the entire Fields set (not technically a collection) to the VB Code.

 Managing Multiple Team Projects in VSTS (audio of the webinar)

Many Agile/Scrum projects have more than one team, but few Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (tm) Process Templates address the issues of managing multiple teams pulling from the same product backlog. The Implementing Agile Development process template provides the data, reporting and team communication features to manage the multiple team project successfully.

On October 16, Rod Claar gave a webinar discussing how to manage multiple team projects using VSTS. He discussed and demonstrated the following features of the IAD process template.  read more »

 Coming Up at Agile 2008

Once again, Net Objectives is a co-sponsor of the Agile 2008 conference. This is a premier gathering for people and organizations involved in Agile software development. This year, it is being held in Toronto, Canada, August 4-8. Every year, we devote a podcast to what Net Objectives is doing at Agile 2008, both to help people who are going know what we are up to and to help people who cannot go know what trends we see that are important, where we will be devoting energy.

In this show, Alan Shalloway covers five primary topics:

• Why we are involved with the Agile conferences and why they are important for the industry
• The Certification by Net Objectives program, which was announced at Agile 2007, including: Scrum Master Certification, Scrum Team Member Certification, and Product Owner Certification 
• The announcement of the Implementing Agile Development using Microsoft Visual Studio process template, which has just been completed by Net Objectives
• An announcement of Scrum#, which is an extension of Scrum that helps to integrate Lean thinking, Scrum/Agile practices, and Emergent Design practices (patterns and test-driven development).
• The Talks that Net Objectives will be giving at Agile 2008

 read more »

This is the first of several posts about how a team can be Agile while using Visual Studio Team System to manage their project and process.

You have probably heard the quip that the last simple project was done in 1960. The complexity and breadth of software projects today is truly astounding.  The size of teams working on a project seems to be getting larger. To deal with this complexity, teams must have higher bandwidth communication and various Agile methodologies like Scrum, XP, BDD, FDD, AUP, and Clear Case achieve this by emphasizing smaller local team sizes.  

However, if only one small Agile team were to take on something the size of a modern DBMS, accounting system, large scale e-commerce site, or a medical records management system, they would not be able to deliver product of sufficient value for years.  To achieve release goals, there have to be dozens or hundreds of small teams working on the project to deliver and maintain the product. And coordinating so many teams is, itself, a complex problem.

Does this sound like a Catch-22?