I didn’t mention how I spent all those years pestering poor Keith, the organizer, to let me be a speaker at Summit.  “C’mon, just a 15-minute lightning session.  The public sector is interesting… no, really…”  He must have had a good laugh this summer when I told him I was moving to Northwest Cadence, me having no clue then that Northwest Cadence is a Platinum Sponsor of the entire Summit!  I think Keith might have had a better idea what was in store for me than I did!

So I arrived at this year’s Summit unsure what my new role and our Platinum Sponsorship would mean for me.  Keith already rolls out the red carpet for all attendees, so it’s not like I needed to be treated any more specially.

Interact!

The Summit really is as much about connecting with people—industry colleagues, thought leaders, and real development teams trying to solve real problems—as it is listening to lectures.  Northwest Cadence demands this of me, which I love, though I’m still trying to overcome feelings of guilt whenever I miss or multitask any part of a session…

It’s a huge thrill to find that some attendees remember me from last year.  One actually did a double-take: “Steven, she’s with you guys now?!”  Double win!

On Tuesday afternoon, the Summit rolled out its new concept, Open Spaces: self-organizing discussion groups on attendee-selected topics.  Martin, Steven and I dove into a big one: “Scrum or Kanban?”  We talk about this in the office all the time, and we give Coffee Talk webcasts on it, so I’m eager to expand my/our knowledge with insights from others.  Scrum.org was well-represented in the group, but I was surprised, and fascinated, to see Kanban take up the majority of the discussion time!  It seems that while a lot of teams have adopted Scrum, for one reason or another they may be looking to introduce Lean/Kanban thinking into their process as well.  2011 is perfect timing for this, as we’ll see later…

Kanban Is Buzzing

On Wednesday afternoon, our own Steven Borg delivered a session entitled “Questioning the Big Bang Theory: The Case for Incremental Change”.  Even though the title was tuned to be agnostic and accessible, Steven can’t outrun his reputation, so quite a few attendees greeted him with, “… and we can’t wait to see your Kanban session later!”

Figure: The kids back at the office had their fun with his goofy agenda image…

I got to work in advance with Steven to help craft his presentation, including playing with Prezi, an awesome, non-linear alternative to PowerPoint.  We had fun watching each other’s adorable little Prezi avatars wander around the screen as we co-edited online.

Steven’s an amazing speaker, by far one of the most engaging at the Summit, and I’m not just saying that because his company pays me.  (Pretty much reverse that causation arrow… but that’s another blog post.)  Check out the recorded sessions if you have any doubts about this.

I think there’s a need in our industry to address the question of incremental change, too: Scrum provides great, interconnected, proven tools right out of the box, but what if your management won’t give you a box?  Steven showed us how concepts from Kanban supported by specific techniques for followup, problem-solving and incremental actual change offer a good alternative.  Or a good supplement!

I was motivated by this and Tuesday’s Open Space to blog about what I see as a Kanban risk: Underpants Gnomes. Kanban helps you visualize an existing process, but does your team have the necessary mindset and skills to then identify problems correctly and fix them positively and productively?

Technical Reception

After hours on Wednesday, the Northwest Cadence operations crew came over and we set us up a cool sponsor booth and live demoing station.  We raffled a DIY Kanban Wall kit with the same supplies we used to create our own Kanban Wall at our office: magnetic primer, chalkboard paint, smudgeproof chalk markers, laminated dry-erase magnet cards, lots of fiddly magnetic bits, painting implements, dropcloths and a bucket.  We set up some other paint-themed decorations and threatened to put the newest ALM Consultant in the Ty-vek Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man paint suit… wait, I’m the newest ALM Consultant!  Help!

Our idea for Mini Coffee Talks with self-organizing topics didn’t quite take off as we’d hoped, though mostly for the very satisfying reason that attendees kept wandering over and striking up conversations and keeping all of us consultants busy all evening.  I played around with IntelliTrace at the demo station for a few minutes, which I don’t think constituted a demo because I think only Dan was watching; for the rest of the evening, about every 20 minutes or so I’d wander over to the laptop and put up a single provocative slide to see if I could get a conversation started.  One of my favorites, “ATDD: Because Customers Lie” was a crowd-pleaser, and I’m looking forward to building out that idea in a future full-length Coffee Talk.

Everything Scrum Is New Again

Several of our esteemed industry colleagues got into shape in 2011 and turned up at the Summit looking fit and trim.  Great job, guys!  This year, Scrum also finds itself right-sizing and focusing on essentials.  Our own Martin Hinshelwood summarizes the overall change in approach beautifully in his blog post Are you doing Scrum? Really?, authored during the Summit.

Figure: Don’t be too sad for it; it had a good run.

Perhaps the most jarring change for Processistas is the sudden and unexpected demise of Scrum But.

Is this the start of a kinder, gentler Scrum?  When I started working with Steven and Martin on our “Scrum vs. Kanban” webcasts, I joked that I wanted to move us away from “shootout at the OK Corral” and towards “Kum-Ba-Ya around the campfire”.  Who’s laughing now?  Scrum is newly open to modification and extension, so we’re replacing Scrum But with Scrum And!  Maybe now the process community can focus on helping teams find a the right mix of techniques that work for them.

The round-table format of the Thursday presentation by David Starr (now at Scrum.org, nice catch y’all) was nicely engaging, a good way to get folks up to speed on Scrum 2011 and address their specific questions, with Professional Scrum Trainers (including Martin) scattered throughout the room to support and keep things focused.

I’m totally reworking my “Scrum-damentals” webcast sessions coming up December 1 and December 15 on MSDN, so tune in there if you’d like to see what all this fuss is about!  Hopefully I will have figured it out by then.

Tools Still Rule

The focus of the Summit was further clarified this year with the split into an Application Lifecycle Management (process) track and an Agile Developer (practices) track, but it’s clear (as it is every year) that for this audience, tools rule: rooms filled up and Twitter traffic spiked any time a presenter on either track did a cool demo, especially around Dev11/vNext.

Post-Conference Workshop

Steven brought me in along with Martin to assist him in teaching Friday’s course, “Enterprise Management of the Software Process”.  They let me run the “Intro to Scrum” portion of the agenda, where I got to try out my new learnings and did a respectable job explaining the core framework and extensibility principles.

Nearly everyone in the room was already doing Scrum, and were eager to learn whatever we could share with them to help them move to the “high-performing” end of the bell curve.  In Thursday’s session, Steven had touched upon queuing theory and his Monte Carlo simulation spreadsheet—on Friday he expanded upon this idea to illustrate two key concepts:

1. Queues are a bigger problem than we generally recognize
2. Work in Process (WIP) limits significantly improve queuing

My favorite part was Martin and Steven’s live coin-flip queuing demo, which really made it understandable for the non-math-majors in attendance!

Wrap-Up

ALM Summit is by far my favorite conference, the one I used to fight every year at my old job to be able to attend.  It’s comical that I totally by accident (if you believe in accidents) ended up working for one of its Platinum Sponsors.  Now I’m graduating from audience member and #fangrrrl to an all-access backstage pass and… I wouldn’t say producer credits yet, more like a junior member of the stage crew.  This is a community I’m happy to be part of, and I hope Northwest Cadence and I can continue to grow as leaders in the process, practices and tools arena for years to come!

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!

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

Click the image for a link to Tech Ed! And be sure to drop by and visit us at the Team System booth!

Metrics that Matter: Reporting with Team Foundation Server

Am I crazy to think that making informed decisions in regards to your software development process is a good idea? Of course not, and that is why the crown jewel of TFS is the data warehouse that silently gathers metrics behind the scenes. In this session, I will take you into the depths of reporting with TFS and open your eyes to the power of metrics. Using both Excel and Reporting Services, you will see how to create reports that provide traceability and transparency into your software development process.

Check out the schedule to see the updated session times.

If you would like to see anything specific in regards to reporting with TFS, comment and let me know!

Upcoming Team System Events

October 24: MVP TV: Gaze into the Crystal Ball: Reporting in Team System made Easy! (Webcast)

You’ve paid your nickel and it’s time to ask the Zoltar Fortune Teller for your future: “Is my software development project going down the toilet? Will I be able to ship on time, with high quality? Can I hit my budget?” (Wait, three questions = three nickels.) Zoltar says… Let’s face it, traditional status reporting is about as accurate as I am, and worse, it takes a whole lot longer!!! Team System can help! Its built in reporting capabilities provide a strong foundation for understanding the current status of your project. Not only does it provide a series of built in reports, it gathers the metrics to allow for excellent ad-hoc reports! Using both the built in and ad hoc report capabilities, finding the current status of your project, and predicting your project’s probability of success or failure along several axis. Come learn how to predict your future! You’ll learn how to interpret the build in reports, learn what’s required to create the reports, and how to use Excel pivot tables to connect to the TFS cube for ad hoc reporting.

To register, go to: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032391376&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

November 5: Enterprise Build Automation w/VSTS 2008 Team System & Team Build (Portland)

Steven Borg of Northwest Cadence (Microsoft Team System MVP) will be covering some of the great new features of Team Build 2008, an inherent and powerful part of Visual Studio Team System 2008. You’ll learn to use Team Build 2008 to radically improve your code!

Come see real unit and functional tests being built, real code metrics being generated, and real work being done in an automated build. You’ll learn how to build legacy code, run tests and code metrics, rebuild your database, update your documentation, and even deploy your application into various test environments; all coordinated by a single command.

To register, go to: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=132684

November 15-16, 2008: Code Camp

Join Northwest Cadence and others at Code Camp where developers talk with – and learn from – fellow developers.  It is a community event and all are welcome to attend and speak.  Code Camps have been wildly successful, and we are excited to participate in this success in Seattle.  Check out https://seattle.codecamp.us for more details.

November 18: Coffee Talk – Welcome. Help Us Set the Stage! (Webcast)

We’ll briefly cover VSTS, ALM, and introduce you to the coffee talks.  Bring your questions, desires and needs.  We’ll have some fun, answer questions, and plan topics for future coffee talks.

To register, go to: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=132790

December 2: Coffee Talk – Visual Studio 2010 (Webcast)

You may have seen some of the fantastic new features of Visual Studio Team System 2010 (aka Rosario).  Drastically improved automated testing, architect tools that actually work, and tons of improvements to make your lives easier and time spent more productive.  We’ll cover several of the new features, and answer questions about the things you’re looking forward to.  Bring your own questions, too!

To register, go to: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=132791

December 4: Eagerly Awaiting VSTS 2010? (Kirkland)

Join Northwest Cadence and explore the new features of Visual Studio Team System 2010 and what it means for your business, productivity, application management, and quality. During this event, we will cover Team Foundation Server and the much-hyped hierarchical work items, new improvements to History, Merge, Work Item Queries, and the focus on Agile development.

Numerous improvements from the Architecture edition (including full support for UML 2.x) will be demonstrated, including the new Architecture Explorer which allows you to quickly and easily visualize an application from the high level down to the object dependencies. We will also highlight many Developer edition functionalities such as updated tools for performance profiling, the Historical Debugger (formerly called “Proteus”), and the ability to view affected tests based on changes to the code. Finally, we will cover the Test Edition with a focus on the “Camano” user interface, Manual Test Runner, Test Case Management, and how Team System 2010 is a strong and reliable testing platform.

To register, go to: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=132801

December 16: Coffee Talk – Reporting (webcast)

You may have seen some of the fantastic reports TFS provides out of the box at conferences and presentations.  We will answer lots of questions in this session: Have you wondered why the reports at your company don’t look quite as nice?  Are they missing enough data to make decisions?    What reports should you pay special attention to (Project Managers), and why should you even care about the reports (developers)?   We will also cover a few of things you need to do to really get the data into the reports and talk about how to interpret some of our favorite reports.  And, if you ask, we’ll cover how to interpret your favorites, too!

To register, go to: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=132792

December 30: Coffee Talk – Software Development Lifecycle

With the thousands of books and articles published on Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC), do you ever feel overwhelmed sorting through what is hype vs. what is actually being adopted by .NET corporations?  During this Coffee Talk, we will answer this question plus others that you bring!  We will explore the complexity of software development, the current best practices for improving your Software Development Life Cycle, and industry best practices and the latest IT research.

To register, go to: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=132794

January 8: Eagerly Awaiting VSTS 2010? (Portland)

Join Northwest Cadence and explore the new features of Visual Studio Team System 2010 and what it means for your business, productivity, application management, and quality. During this event, we will cover Team Foundation Server and the much-hyped hierarchical work items, new improvements to History, Merge, Work Item Queries, and the focus on Agile development.

Numerous improvements from the Architecture edition (including full support for UML 2.x) will be demonstrated, including the new Architecture Explorer which allows you to quickly and easily visualize an application from the high level down to the object dependencies. We will also highlight many Developer edition functionalities such as updated tools for performance profiling, the Historical Debugger (formerly called “Proteus”), and the ability to view affected tests based on changes to the code. Finally, we will cover the Test Edition with a focus on the “Camano” user interface, Manual Test Runner, Test Case Management, and how Team System 2010 is a strong and reliable testing platform.

To register, go to: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=1328012

Here’s a short blurb!  For more information, or to register, send an email to info@nwcadence.com.

In this free, 3 hour Team System training session, we will explore the new features of Visual Studio Team System 2010 and what it means for your business, productivity, application management and quality. The areas we will cover are Team Foundation Server and the much hyped hierarchical work items as well as improvements to History, Merge, Work Item Queries and the focus on Agile development. The Architecture editions numerous improvements (including full support for UML 2.x) will be demonstrated as well as the new Architecture Explorer which allows you to quickly and easily visualize an application from the high level down to the object dependencies. The developer edition provides updated tools for performance profiling, the Historical Debugger (formerly called “Proteus”) and the ability to view affected tests based on changes to the code. Finally, we’ll cover the Test Edition with a focus on the “Camano” user interface, Manual Test Runner, Test Case Management and the fact that Team System 2010 is a reliable testing platform with the features you expect it to have!

Here’s a brief blurb.  To learn more, send an email to info@nwcadence.com.

The focus of this training course is on the effective use of Team System to improve an organization’s application management lifecycle. Software teams will learn not only how to use Team System effectively, but how to use Team System to improve their software development process. Developers will learn improve the quality of their code and speed development. Testers will learn to validate code quality and track test cases. Project managers will learn to use Team System to bring their projects under control. Configuration Managers will learn the best practices around branching strategies and will learn to create a tailored software configuration management strategy. As a team, you will learn how to use TFS to increase traceability, improve the quality of your code and ease the process of releasing your applications.

All the Interaction of the MSDN Chats but with the richer experience of Live meeting and hosted by the recognized world technology leaders –the Visual Studio Team System Microsoft MVP’s.
– Charles Sterling on MVP TV

I’m on TV!  MVP TV, that is!  I’ll be doing Gaze Into the Crystal Ball: Reporting in Team System made Easy! You can register for the event at the link above (or the one below!).

Here’s the announcement:

MVP TV: Gaze into the Crystal Ball: Reporting in Team System made Easy!

Target: This Product Group Interaction is open to all Developer MVPs in all Technical Expertise and public audience.

You’ve paid your nickel and it’s time to ask the Zoltar Fortune Teller for your future: “Is my software development project going down the toilet? Will I be able to ship on time, with high quality? Can I hit my budget?” (Wait, three questions = three nickels.) Zoltar says… Let’s face it, traditional status reporting is about as accurate as I am, and worse, it takes a whole lot longer!!! Team System can help! Its built in reporting capabilities provide a strong foundation for understanding the current status of your project. Not only does it provide a series of built in reports, it gathers the metrics to allow for excellent ad-hoc reports! Using both the built in and ad hoc report capabilities, finding the current status of your project, and predicting your project’s probability of success or failure along several axis. Come learn how to predict your future! You’ll learn how to interpret the build in reports, learn what’s required to create the reports, and how to use Excel pivot tables to connect to the TFS cube for ad hoc reporting.

Note: The original delivery of this presentation was the second highest rating of all TechEd 2008 presentations and Steve has made it even BETTER!!

About Steven Borg: Steven Borg is a principal of Northwest Cadence, a Microsoft VSTS Inner Circle partner, that focuses exclusively on helping companies improve their Application Lifecycle Management using Team System. At Northwest Cadence, he is the VSTS Practice Lead, and has worked with dozens of corporations to improve their overall software development process, including identifying and reporting appropriate metrics supporting process improvement. In addition, he assists the Team System community as a Team System MVP.

Meeting Credentials:
Event URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/join?id=ST6NTP&role=attend&pw=4449ml+WK3W

Event ID: 1032391376