Where Technology Meets Teamwork » Steven Borg

MS Office 2007 Required for TFS 2010 Integration

Steven Borg — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:00:30 +0000

Quick note: Office 2007 is required for the TFS 2010 / Office integration.

So, if you’re using Excel 2003 or Project 2003, and hoping for integration with TFS 2010 you’re out of luck. The Office integration in TFS 2010 is limited to Office 2007 (or higher, I suppose).

Slipstreaming TFS2008 on Windows Server 2008

Steven Borg — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:06:23 +0000

If you’re installing TFS2008 using SQL Server 2008, you MUST slipstream your installation. However, if you’re installing on Windows Server 2008, and using SQL Server 2005, you do NOT need to slipstream.

However…

If you’re installing WSS 3.0 on the server during the installation process (such as for a clean install), then you really ought to to create a slipstream version of the TFS install with TFS SP1. Reason? Without the slipstream, you have to install WSS 3.0 with Sp2 on your own, and configure it. And it takes less time to create the slipstream than to install WSS 3.0 with Sp2.

So, create a slipstream and install it! You can find slipstreaming instructions all over the web, but here’s a good one from my friend (and TFS super-genius) Martin Woodward. You can access it at: creating a TFS 2008 SP1 slipstreamed install.

TechEd 2009: We’re #2 (And #3, and #4)

Steven Borg — Mon, 18 May 2009 05:56:19 +0000

We’re all finally home! Jeff Levinson, Shad Timm, and I spent last week speaking, listening, learning and playing at TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles, CA. Those who’ve been to TechEd, know the fire hose of information unleashed at the attendees coving developer topics from designing Azure cloud based application to Visual Studio Team System, not to mention all the infrastructure talks!

I won’t regale you with stories of the parties or the in-hall discussions, but I do want to highlight three talks, and our role at TechEd.
With all the votes counted, Northwest Cadence did well. In addition to speaking to great audiences, interacting with really smart people and meeting some new clients, our sessions apparently hit the mark and were rated highly by the attendees! Three of our talks deserve special mention:

Branching and Merging for Parallel Development, a talk by Jeff Levinson on the benefits and pitfalls or various branching strategies took 3rd place in the Developer Tools, Languages and Frameworks track.
Practical Regulatory Compliance and Risk Management, my talk on using Team System to help software development teams achieve regulatory compliance (as well as manage risk) took 2nd place in the Developer Practices track.
Metrics That Matter: Using Team System for Process Improvement, my talk on metrics took 4th place in the Developer Practices track.

Finally, we spoke at the preconference. (Can I say “finally”, when it preceded all the other talks?) Of the 15 preconferences, our talk titled Improve Your Software Development: Real World Solutions with Team System 2008 ranked 2nd just behind the excellent talk on SharePoint planning and governance.

For anyone interested in hearing or seeing these sessions, shoot me an email or leave a comment! I’d love to share them with you! We’re representing several of these sessions at our TechTalk: VSTS Firestarter event on the Microsoft Campus this Thursday, and we’ll be recording them.

A special thanks to those customers who generously allowed us to use your stories, and especially to those who went so far as to provide us with their data warehouse and cube. You guys rock! Thank you!

New Radio TFS Episode on Adopting Team System with Steven Borg

Steven Borg — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:39:36 +0000

A few weeks ago during the MVP summit, I had the wonderful experience of hanging out with Martin Woodward of Teamprise and RadioTFS fame. We chatted for an hour on strategies for adopting TFS successfully, recorded the conversation, and it has just been released as this months episode of Radio TFS.

Have a listen: Adopting Team System with Steven Borg

Using Excel for Team System Reporting – Video

Steven Borg — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 22:15:04 +0000

I created a short video to demonstrate how to use Excel 2007 to create a cumulative flow diagram (often called Remaining Work) that gets its data directly from the OLAP cube used by Team System (TfsWarehouse). The video is currently highlighted on our site, but you can see the whole thing on Vimeo. Here’s the link: VSTS Reporting with Excel – Cumulative Flow Diagram.

Requirements are not dead.

Steven Borg — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:39:00 +0000

Hearing many of my fellow agilists talk, you’d think requirements management, and even requirements themselves, have shuffled off their mortal coil. Unless, of course, they are provided on a 3×5 card and ranked in a one-dimensional, user prioritized stack. Let me apologize for a moment for using narrowly defining the “agile zealot”, but you know them. To them, all things good are agile, and all things bad are non-agile. There are few, if any grey areas, and large, complex software development shops who still have business analysts creating use cases and requirements documents just are too archaic (or stupid) to realize their error. This confidence in the simplicity of requirements has always left me with a feeling of dread — in my experience, requirements can be complicated beasts. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a LOT to learn from the agile camp. In fact, I believe most companies err on the side of too much complexity in their requirements, and the requirement management process.

Thus I was pleased to see that Scott Ambler, one of the agile luminaries, wrote on article highlighting the difficulties of requirement specification on agile projects. Of specific interest was his absolutely wonderful quote on the first page:

Although “agile in the small” methodologies such as Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) have done much to show us how to improve our approach, too many people have thrown out the requirements management baby with the bureaucracy bathwater ater putting too much faith in the overly simplistic strategies of those processes.

Jeff Levinson, our ALM Practice Lead has written about this problem and others in several blog posts, most noticably in his post on the problems of Requirements Engineering tools. It’s also a very frequent discussion over the water cooler here at Northwest Cadence. Expect to see more on requirements management discussions coming here over the next few months.

MVP TV rescheduled

Steven Borg — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 03:06:36 +0000

Unfortunately, the MVP TV session “Gaze Into the Crystal Ball: Reporting in Team System” session had to be rescheduled due to a malformed URL being sent to the attendees. Not too many folks were able to make it into the LiveMeeting. So, if you were one of those folks, we are rescheduling, but still haven’t determined the right date. Keep posted, and I’ll be sure to let everyone know the date, right here on the blog! If you’re curious about what we’re going to cover, you can see the prior post here.

The Microsoft Borg

Steven Borg — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:39:59 +0000

I’m heading to Portland to give a presentation on Team Build 2008, and an announcement went up on the Portland Area .NET User Group mailing list. This was one of the replies, which gave me quite a few laughs! Hat tip to Rich Claussen!

Let me get this straight: the guy’s name is Borg and it’s at Microsoft and you want people to voluntarily show up? No thanks I’ll just wait for them to show up at my house and assimilate me (just kidding).

Although I get that a lot with my last name, I thought this was very well written!

By the way, if you’re down in the Portland area, sign up for the Team Build presentation on November 5th, 2008. You should also check out PADNUG, if you have an interest in all things .NET!

Why is the Estimated Work field not available in TFS Reports?

Steven Borg — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 06:24:52 +0000

The Estimated Work field is used to maintain the estimate for a Task work item in the MSF for CMMI Process Template. However, if you’re creating your own report, you’ll find that it’s missing from the available data from both the TfsWarehouse (data warehouse) and TfsWarehouse (OLAP cube). That’s because the process template that defines the field did not specify the field as reportable. Thus, it never makes its way into the cube. This means it is very difficult, out of the box, to use TFS to report on variance between estimated work and actual work (the latter which IS stored in the warehouse and cube). To correct this, be sure to create your own estimated work field which sets the reportable attribute to “measure”. This will get them into the OLAP cube where they can be used effectively. (CAUTION: if you are using MS Project, be sure to modify the Project field mappings for your template to map your newly created field instead of the default (and defective) Estimated Work field.

AgileBUG – The Agile Beer Users Group

Steven Borg — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 06:06:43 +0000

Tonight I attended the Agile Beer Users Group, or AgileBUG for short. It was a loose get-together hosted by John (who’s last name was quickly forgotten after the first beer… apologies, John). Very informal, yet filled with a lively assortment of varied developers who have a passion for agile (or at least, beer). True to it’s name, the beer flowed, pitchers bought one at a time by the groups sponsors (which, at this particular meeting, were anyone who happened to volunteer).

Sometimes traditional user groups can be a bit dry, or can hit topics of little interest to folks. Not so the AgileBUG. It seemed to obey the “two feet” rule of the Bar Camps… “If you aren’t interested in what’s being said, you have two feet!” Groups formed over topics, voices were raised, discussions were had, and beer was drank. Despite the loose organization, I was surprised at how well the discussions made their way back to agile, and to agile practices. Occassionally, someone would shout out a poll, and everyone (even those from different conversations) would chime in with their answer. Very informative.

I’m so often surrounded by people working within Team System. It’s refreshing to see and hear people with wildly different tools and expectations. At one point, attendees were praising the virtues of metrics for convincing management of the need for agile. I quite agree. Yet only moments before the same folks had expressed a preference for Subversion and index cards. Again, I’m OK with any tools — it’s the process, not the tooling, that is most important. Yet, Team System has the capability to make metric gathering so painless. Very, very valuable metrics — those very metrics needed to convince management to adopt agile — are available from Team System without needing to unnecessarily impact the developerment process. Ah, I’m getting beside myself, and on a tangent. Another post, maybe.

Well, maybe a quick side note: At Northwest Cadence, we work with clients on process improvement initiatives, and we always collect metrics and baseline our improvement initiatives to show results. These results are then backed by real data. I would think the agile community would be desperate for a tool like Team System. Well, maybe they are… In my own informal poll, a little more than 1/3 of the folks there were either using Team System right now, or were in the process of migrating to it. So maybe it is the tool of choice, but it lacks the “coolness factor” due to it’s size (or it’s creator).

Anyway… The Agile Beer Users Group… Check it out! If you’d like to present, you’re likely to get an opportunity to shine in the spotlight. And if you’d just like to attend, you could do far worse with 2 hours of your life!