The Solidity Blog

Orcanos is an Israeli provider on an ALM solution I’ve been working with for the last year. Together we have accomplished successful implementations for currently 6 customer. On the 26th of October I plan to participate in a conference held by Orcanos to QA managers of the medical sector. I was asked to prepare a presentation that will demonstrate the fundamentals of Scrum and how they are achieved in Orcanos ALM product: QPack based on the projects we did together.

I used the wonderful presentation distributed by Mountain Goat Software LLC and added a bunch of screen shots that show how QPack implements those concepts, together with a  little animation with my insights.

I’m attaching the presentation for everybody interested in Scrum and medical Scrum projects.

When people ask me what am I doing for a living, the answer was always very simple: I’m a consultant. I consult individuals, teams and even organizations about building better software lifecycle management systems.

Having such a firm grasp of my occupation, you can imagine my surprise when one of my customers (while introducing me to a colleges) referred to me as ‘my coach’. When the  second and the third time followed I’ve decided that I need to look into it and define to myself the meaning behind each title.

I did some goggling about the subject and then phoned a friend that is a ‘real’ coach (had formal training and is holding a diploma with honors) and tried to understand how different is his approach from mine.

My main findings are that while a consultant job is to supply a solution or a set of alternatives for the customer to select from, the coach is responsible for safely walking the customer through the solution building steps (set goals, analyze what you currently have, explore your options, make a plan and act). 

I guess that now I can say that the main difference between a consultant and a coach is that the first is serving the customer with the pre-cooked (and even filleted ) fish, but the second is the person handing you the fishing net.

Even thought Visual Studio Team System 2010 is at it’s beta stages, the participants of the user group are very deep into the new version education. We already had a end-to-end session that presented a full lifecycle solution, going from architecture to development, testing and deployment and deployment. In order to cover all of the functionality, instead of having a single presenter, we had 5 presenters on stage!!

so, what’s next?

November – Test & Lab Management – 2010

December – Configuration Management with TFS 2010. Presenting source control and build new capabilities

January – Visual Studio Team System for Architect

once the Microsoft guys will have the information on the events pages I will add links to the registration forms.

There are so many definitions for application lifecycle management out there; almost all of them discussing the relations between the phases of software manufacturing. There were times that I completely agreed with them, and don’t get me wrong,on the methodological level: I still do, but on the practical level I think they left out the most important part: lifecycle management is all about cutting costs and effectively using resources to optimize your product value. IIn my opinion, the key success criteria for lifecycle process implementation are whether the business is able, at one glace, to find out the complete expected expenditure on a new feature and the timeline for its release. Software development should not be looked at through a foggy glass; all the information should be available and crystal clear for the decision makers. Once we are technically able to measure every new requirement coming from a customer or a feature suggestion by our product manager by its real value: the amount we are about to spend building it opposed to the expected volume of sales and revenues, only then we gain the ability of achieving well balanced technical/business decisions and focus all our efforts on the features necessary for our product success.

This month, the group had a great opportunity to have Gadi Meir talk to us about the way he sees MSF. Gadi has received great reactions from the group during the session and after it via email and phone. This shows that MSF is far from being the simple templates that are a built-in ability in TFS and that Team System users should understand the concepts and paradigms behind it in order of making the most out of it.

You can download the MSF presentation (mostly Hebrew…) and also follow our the group RSS to be notified about the next session, both by Gadi and by others in the Team System community. In July we start a new and exciting initiative in the group and will be examining subjects in a series of sessions allowing multiple aspects and speakers to take part. The first series will be about VSTS 2010 and will start on July by a ‘Lap around 2010’ led by SRL consultant. Please subscribe to the group RSS to get the updated information about the lectures.

I spend my days working on Team System ALM projects and creating an environment of collaboration for development teams. One of the biggest benefits of implementing an ALM solution is the fact that everybody is aware and exposed to the status of the project (using a permissions mechanism when appropriate) and are able to respond and progress with their tasks in the project. Although the concepts sounds reasonable on the kickoff meeting, I’m always required to do a lot of buy-in to the process down the road of the actual implementation.

Some of the difficulties are about automating the ‘chain of command’ and the need to define team and personal queries to be used as a method of transferring tasks between team members. But most of the problems raise when users ask the most legitimate questions: ‘How will I know that something has change, do I need to run my queries all the time?’

My answer is both: yes and no.

Yes – because this is actually a very good practice: this is your pool of tasks and responsibilities so the first thing you should do when turning on your computer in the morning is checking your assignments (a note to Microsoft: it would be nice if the query results pane will refresh automatically)

No – because some tasks must be addressed on the spot and we cannot wait for the assigned person to manually pull them. for this kind of tasks and situations use the alert mechanism and make sure the notification is pushed immediately.

In TFS 2008, using TFPT, it is very simple to add a new alert, almost too simple (another note to Microsoft: can we use the already defined queries instead of declaring some of them all over again?) so please make sure you don’t overuse it. Although it is very nice to be in control and receive and email on every change, very fast the amount of emails will in your inbox will cover the real important notifications you do need to receive.

To summarize the above: ALM is here to help your team collaborate, save you time and money. Learn how to use it and create a reasonable mix between manual pulling and automatic pushing of notifications. And remember that you can always adjust the system and refine the queries and alerts to support the way that you want to work today!

This week, Gadi Meir will educate the participants of the user group in the methodologies and practices of MSF as are implemented as an integral part of Team Foundation Server and Team System.

Although almost every user of Team System has some knowledge of MSF (using the MSF for agile template) most of us only use the work item templates and forget about the logic behind them.

To learn about MSF as Microsoft intended for it to be please join us this week:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032417473&Culture=he-IL

The first time I’ve heard about MSF (Microsoft Solution Framework) is was a huge pile of documents and templates, covering the entire scope of the software manufacturing world, and than some more.. After spending several days reading and practicing, the feeling I’ve got was that this is actually the best source of development methodologies knowledge I came across but that the abundance of knowledge and it’s unstructured nature make it very difficult to implement.

Our second meeting was in 2005 in the MSF for agile template of team system. From the practical perspective I was very pleased to see that Microsoft has reduced the learning curve for using MSF and of course the managerial overhead required. But, I cannot ignore the fact that there is a huge gap between the old MSF  and the minimalist version in Team System. It is true that if you bother to read and follow the documentation (can be found in the portal under ‘process guidance’) you will find a very logical, and moderately methodical MSF process covering the activities of the major role players with fair explanations about the best practices for using the work items, built-in reports and document templates. The problem is that most users do not find the time or energy to follow all that and from a quick survey I conducted lately the vast majority of users only use the bare minimum and use the work items (using the very basic fields) hence leaving out most of the benefits and tools that MSF contains.

How can this be solved? with awareness and good implementation skills… in my opinion, it is important to make sure that a new customer, starting to work with TFS will understand the basic concepts of MSF and the way they are implemented throughout the Team System platform. Just having a quick explanations about using work items is hardly enough.

I have so much more to say about the issue but since it will not fit here I will just make a short list of my coming posts related to this issue:

• Gadi Meir lecture at the ALM user group about MSF
• MSF 2005 (2008) vs MSF 2010
• MSF and Scrum

This week I finally found the time (actually, it took me less than 5 minutes to open the group and create the site, which really makes we wonder why I’ve waited so long….) and opened the official Israeli MS ALM user group in the Microsoft live site.

The new site will contain information about the coming sessions and presentations (and code when applicable) from previous sessions and it also a platform for all Team Foundation Users in Israeli to raise subjects of interest that you would like as to arrange sessions about. This is also the place to step up and suggest the subjects for the sessions you would like to lead!

Please feel free to login and register (you can use an existing hotmail/live id or easily create a new one) : http://almug.groups.live.com/

you can find the last load session presentation in the skydrive

The May meeting on the Israeli user group focused in the fascinating world of load testing. Shai Raiten from Sela Group has completed a ‘mini series’ of lectures in the group. His last session has established the grounds by discussing web/automated testing in team system using the visual studio team edition for tester. This month session took off from where he left the last time and progressed to discuss the usage on web testing as an input to smoke/load/stress testing. you can download the full length presentations from Shai’s blog and from the user group site:

first session – web testing in team system

second session – load testing in team system

and again, thank you Shai for the super professional presentations you delivered!