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Agile Transformation of a Microsoft product team - Cameron Skinner
General Manager Cameron Skinner has led three Microsoft development teams through agile transformations. Cameron will discuss the various challenges that he and his teams encountered during the various Visual Studio product cycles where Agile and SCRUM techniques were used, as well as discuss how Team Foundation Server was used to manage releases, bug tracking, requirements, and general project velocity and health. This will be a frank and candid retrospective on what worked and what didn’t during those product cycles.
Chasing agility - Chris Kinsman
Vertafore is an ISV that has been chasing agility over the last few years. We currently have in excess of 25 scrum teams working on over a dozen products. As we have adopted and scaled up various agile practices we have encountered and solved a number of issues. This session will shared some of the issues we have encountered as well as how we resolved them.
Connecting Developer Workflow: Mylyn and the Task-Focused Interface - David Green
In under four years, Mylyn’s task-focused interface has gone from a university whiteboard to a tool with over a million monthly downloads. The next big step in the evolution of developer tools is becoming more clear. Tasks and work items are more important than files, focus is more important than features, and an explicit context is a great way to automatically connect software planning to production. The Eclipse Mylyn project has restructured the integrated development environment (IDE) interaction around tasks, connecting the developer’s workflow to Agile and ALM systems. Integrating with over 50 different ALM systems, Mylyn provides the developer with unified access and features such as cross-repository linking and Agile planning. In this talk we will be announcing new developments around Mylyn that will be bringing these integration and productivity benefits to users of Microsoft TFS and developers based in Visual Studio.
Extending the ALM Platform - Mario Cardinal
Discover how third-party vendors fill the gaps and add value to the Microsoft's ALM platform. Whether you need Outlook integration, Agile planning or release management, there is a solution available today. Learn the criteria for evaluating how third-party products integrate seamlessly with your ALM platform. Overall, discover how to build an ALM platform that enable the whole team (Stakeholders, Analysts, Developers, and Testers) to work together to produce quality products.
From Individual to Team to Organization - Brian Harry
With the 2010 release, the Visual Studio product line has grown from the best individual development environment but as the best team collaboration environment as well. Technical Fellow Brian Harry will discuss the roadmap that will extend to cover the needs of the organization beyond the development and test team, encompassing stakeholders and operations, in a distributed world of mixed on- and off-premises computing. What are the principles that drive us, what have we learned from our customers, what practices have we learned from the industry?
Heterogeneous ALM Environments - Jamie Cool
One of the fundamental benefits to ALM methodologies is being able to collaborate & work together. This collaboration needs to happen irrespective of what platform, technology, or language one team may be using compared to another team. Team Foundation Server can be used for software development by your entire organization - not just the team using Microsoft platforms and technologies. This session will show you how you can get your Java, Mac, Linux, and Eclipse developers working with your Microsoft developers. This session shows you how you can standardize on Team Foundation Server for the Application Lifecycle Management of your entire enterprise. See how to manage work items, version control, and build automation across technology and platform boundaries in your company and understand the features and functionality available to the people in your organization.
How are they different, really? - Eric Willeke
We will explore core principles through a lens clarifying how much our various approaches (and not just the "agile" ones) really have in common, along with an exploration of how the various mechanisms reflect a framework's choices about which principles to value more heavily. The talk will close with perspectives on moving past the dogmatic adherence to a given framework in favor of a return to common sense and respect for the members of a team and organization.
Increasing Revenue Opportunities with Automated Development Tools - Karel Deman
Confused.com - a large UK based price comparison site - depends on the ability of its development team to quickly turn market opportunities into consumer products. In 2009, the IT team evaluated the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 product stack. Its team members were confident that its support for Agile processes and end to end automation, along with out of the box testing would significantly cut the time it takes to get new products to market – and it did. This session outlines the journey it took from assessment to implementation and roll-out with a focus on end to end automation using Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management.
IT for the Future - Moving into the Cloud - Tony Scott
Making Continuous Delivery a Reality from Product Backlog to Virtual Lab - Amit Chopra
Continuous integration is at the hub of most agile teams, but today it only extends to the compilation of source code and running of unit tests. But wouldn’t it be even more compelling if you could extend the integration to automatically provision a virtualized test environment with all tiers of a distributed system and see automatically the completed requirements in the build, the tests now ready to run, and the bug fixes ready to verify? Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Ultimate can help make this continuous delivery a reality. In this session, Amit will showcase the end of end experiences of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate features that enable a continuous delivery of high quality bits from development to test and from test team to production like test environments in a tightly integrated manner, eliminating common issues such as no-repro of bug, improving develop & test collaboration , and making complex environment setups a breeze.
The Marriage of Exploratory Testing & Agile Development - Jon Bach
These two approaches have been "dating" each other for years. Jon Bach thinks they were made for each other, so at the Agile 2010 conference, he officially pronounced them "married". Why? Each produces rapid feedback, emphasizes responding to change, and requires learning (or spikes). Jon will show show you how to make exploration accountable (and measurable) in an Agile context, despite the myth that exploratory testing is unscripted, unstructured, and random.
Professional Scrum Developer Practices - David Starr
Effective Scrum developers have very different skills than those required of Product Owners or Scrum Masters . Scrum prescribes self-organizing teams accountable for adopting engineering practices that increase quality, provide inspection at the point of work, and ensure new features are actually done at the end of a Sprint. But what does that mean for software developers? This session details how Professional Scrum Developers use modern engineering practices to reliably deliver a potentially shippable increment of software with each Sprint. Additionally, we'll see how Professional Scrum Developers self-organize to deliver on Scrum's promises and avoid all-to-common patterns of ineffective Scrum.
Quality is the Soul of Agile - Peter Provost
Quality is fitness for purpose in the eyes of the customer. Agile helps us achieve the highest quality result because its short cycles allow rapid feedback and its rigorous definitions of done prevent unforeseen debt. This virtuous cycle makes teams more productive, developers happier, and customers more satisfied. As an agile developer and team lead, Peter Provost will discuss how Agile has affected him personally and professionally.
Requirements Management - a Smooth Transition - Ido Eshed
When Ido Eshed was invited to help build and deploy a Requirements Management (RM) process at a big electronics company, he brought with him his 10 year experience from IBM. But after a short while, he discovered TFS as an ALM process engine that supports all disciplines, including RM, and made a quick and successful transition into the TFS world. The session will discuss the business problems that were identified in the existing RM process, the new practices that were recommended as a solution, and how TFS helps implementing them while focusing on Team collaboration, process enforcement and continuous measurement.
Scenario-Focused Engineering - Austina De Bonte
As software engineers we are continually thinking about how to deliver value to both the customer and the business. Many companies, including Microsoft, are focusing on the customer’s end to end experience in order to deliver that value. This talk introduces some of the practices and examples teams at Microsoft are using to do just that - create customer and business value by delivering compelling end to end experiences.
Scrum: The Third Decade - Ken Schwaber
The state of ALM – An industry view - Dave West
Lean, Agile, Dev Ops are just some of the buzz words being used to describe the transformation of the value stream of application delivery. But what does that mean for the discipline of Application Lifecycle Management? In this talk Dave West, principle Analyst from Forrester Research describes the state of Application Delivery and how major trends such as Agile and Lean are forcing change on ALM. He will paint a picture of modern ALM practices that replace focus on artifacts and stage gates with flow, cadence and transparency. He will highlight organizations that have embarked on the transformation and describe the steps they are following.
Successful software project management styles - Stephanie Cuthbertson
Alistair Cockburn once recommended a “methodology per project”. We have found that multiple methodologies frequently coexist in related projects. Stephanie Cuthbertson will share successful examples of both agile and traditional projects and hybrid contexts in which the two styles coexist successfully in the same organization.
Synchronizing and migrating ALM environments - Grant Holliday
Considering a move to a new ALM environment? Every team has at least one existing system that is critical to the success of their business. To move everybody over at the same time is usually too risky and inconvenient. What happens to all those automated tools and processes that use the current system? What if something doesn't work right? How do you roll back to the previous system?
One of the best ways to mitigate the changeover risk is to run both systems in parallel. This lets people get comfortable with the new system and allows tools to be switched over gradually.
This session will cover the general considerations and best practices for mirroring, along with how the TFS Integration Tools can help you move between ALM environments.
Testing in an Agile World - Vinod Malhotra
Switching to Agile practices is a big paradigm shift, especially for testers. It not only requires a change in tester’s mindset but also appropriate tools are needed to help team members collaborate, to add transparency in the system and to reduce waste. In this session, Vinod Malhotra will cover how Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Ultimate help testers become first class citizens in Agile teams and fulfill the promise of rapid and more frequent delivery of customer value.
The Agile Consensus - Sam Guckenheimer
As mainstream companies have adopted Agile practices, a consensus has been emerging around both the social and technical practices that yield the highest ROI. There are broadly available examples of merging Agile into existing organizations and prioritizating cultural change for the highest return. This talk surveys the business contexts, techniques, tooling and results.
The Future of Collaborative Development - Mary Czerwinski
Software development field research has shown that shared group awareness, coordination and informal communication are the most common ways for software development teams to inform each other of progress. In addition, we have observed that poorly documented, informal communication causes a fragmented workday due to frequent interruptions and knowledge loss due to the passage of time and team attrition. Because informal communication has both advantages and disadvantages for information sharing, it merits deeper study to allow any proposed treatment to preserve the good while reducing the bad. Over the past several years, we have conducted a series of studies at Microsoft Corporation and beyond to document the nature of development team conversations and communications. Based on surveys, lab studies, field studies and interviews, we have begun to develop a suite of tools that allow development teams, both co-located and distributed, to stay more aware of their colleagues’ actions, get on board to a new team more efficiently, and engage with each other at the most optimal times. Examples of many of these tools will be discussed, as will our progress in transitioning these ideas into real products.
Using Failure to Pave the Path for Success - John Szurek
Despite our best intentions, all that we design, or dream, is only rarely realized, and walls we thought we built of stone and concrete are really mud and sand. In building a software development lifecycle process at Clear Channel, we chose the best tools available for our environment, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, then we did the hard process work, carefully defining disciplines, roles, workstreams, and work products. We called this our Solutions Framework, and we documented it, tested it, and trained it. We were proud of it and proud of ourselves, but our success was limited, and it often felt more like failure. This presentation will explore the how and why of the failures, but we refuse to let the story end there. The hard lessons we learned are feeding our next iteration. We are improving unit testing and code review practices to assure that developers cannot simply pass their issues on to create major problems for testing. We are improving consistency and governance across projects with a center of excellence concept for each discipline and a strong PMO. We are returning solution architects to their primary role of architect rather than an overloaded role that included project management, development lead, and business relationship management. A right balance among tools, roles, governance, and execution is necessary to make ALM work.
Values: Exploring the Why Behind What We Do - Jim Newkirk
What values does your software process embody? In my experience most team members cannot answer this question or often respond with something more like practices. This is not sufficient because if you are doing the practice you need to understand how the practice fits in the overall process. In this session we will discuss the importance of determining values, making sure they are well known to your team members and how to choose practices that support these values.
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