Software Development is a Team Sport!

My blog has a new home. You can find me at http://ridlehoover.com .

Our resident p&p Brit has moved his blog. You can now find Ade Miller's thoughts here: http://ademiller.com/blogs/tech/ . Check it out.

In her opening keynote, Susan Ershler told the autobiographical story of her experiences climbing Mt. Everest. It was an entertaining talk. But, relating the subject matter to the Agile community was a bit of a stretch. The primary message of Susan's...

I'm still working on my posts summarizing the Agile 2007 sessions. But, I'm also trying to ship some updates to the TFS process templates right now. I'll kept good notes. So, the conference may be a faint memory, but I will get my thoughts up here. In...

Tuesday saw the opening keynote by Susan Ershler, as well as the beginning of the vendor talks that I organized this year. Here's the full list of sessions I attended: Reaching New Heights: Learning to Adapt by Susan Ershler Agile Tooling: A Point, Counter...

Diana Larsen is a special sort of nut. She's an organizational development and communications expert, not a technologist. Her sessions touch on many of the softer skills necessary to thrive on a team (any team, not just an Agile team). I've been seeking...

In 90 minutes, Garg, Matt and David built a working web photo sharing web site. Garg played customer. David played whip-cracker (um... PM), and David did all the heavy lifting with Rails. This talk was a high level introduction to the speed and power...

The conference is organized a bit differently this year. The only thing going on this morning is registration. So, I checked in and scanned the program guide for sessions I'd like to attend. There are too many good looking talks, this year! I hate that...

I will be attending Agile 2007 in Washington, D.C. next week. In my capacity as Vendor Talks Chair, I will be moderating the vendor talks in Meeting Room 3 on both Tuesday and Thursday. Drop me a note if you're attending the conference. I'd love to...

I am enjoying the copy of Visual Studio Team System: Better Software Development for Agile Teams by Will Stott and James Newkirk that I picked up the other day. So far, it is doing a good job of both explaining Agile and how an Agile team might use VSTS...

Agile software development methods are often described as being forms of something called iterative and incremental development (or, IID). But, what does that mean? I went looking for an answer recently, and was surprised to find a single, simple definition...

Well, my 30 day trial of BlogJet expired recently. I enjoyed using the product. I especially liked the sense of humor embedded in the product. But, in the end, I am just too accustomed to Windows Live Writer to be productive in another tool. And, that...

Due to the number of spam comments I've been receiving (and moderating) lately, I've been forced to limit the length of time that you may comment on a post. I'm hoping this will reduce the amount of time I spend moderating the blog. If you have something...

Joel Spolsky and Dmitri Zimine mixed it up last November over whether or not to interrupt a team in the middle of an iteration. I'm pretty late to this thread. But, I think I have something to add. So, here goes... Dmitri started the thread by arguing...

A CNN International crew from Hong Kong was just here filming the patterns & practices agile development space . They were working on a feature program called Global Office. They filmed me while I pretended to be reading email on Peter’s laptop while...

I’ve used both BlogJet and Windows Live Writer . I’ve yet to make up my mind which I prefer. Both are cool. But, at the moment, I’m leaning towards the former. I especially like the fact that Toaster thought I might want to blog about...

Martha C. Turner (1911-2007) My grandmother died Monday of natural causes. She was 95 years old. And, until about a month ago, she was living at home, driving to church, and doing her own cooking and shopping. She was as sweet and gentle as she was...

How nice of Peter Provost AND Ade Miller to both tag my blog. I feel special. Actually, they're probably just checking to make sure I'm reading their blogs. (Ha!) I'll play along, but only because I (finally) found five more victims. You already know...

I recently stumbled upon the blog of a colleague, John Socha-Leialoha . And, in familiarizing myself with his writing, I found these three solid little posts on what it was like to transition to Test-Driven Development: How I Learned to Stop Worrying...

Thanks to the good folks over at Agile Certification Now , you too can join the legions of Certified Agile Software Specialists already making the industry a safer place. Follow the link. You won't be disappointed.

My team just completed a discussion - at times a rather passionate discussion - about what work items we should be tracking in TFS. Sanjeev , our PM, argued in favor of tracking everything we do - except meetings. I, lead dev and agile purist that I am...

A few years ago, patterns & practices published a book entitled Team Development with Visual Studio .NET and Visual SourceSafe . The book offered solid advice for teams developing software atop .NET using Visual Studio and Visual SourceSafe. It covered...

Need to fire someone? That's probably going to be a crucial conversation. Need to talk to your spouse about the fact that they are having an affair? That's almost certain to become to be a crucial conversation. Need to gently, but firmly ask your pair...

According to Naysawn Naderi , VSTS PM for Developer Oriented Testing, "the majority of the unit testing features of Team System" will be available in the Pro level SKU with the upcoming release of Visual Studio Orcas. This is fantastic news because...

Also announced recently, for those who missed it, was our Team System Future Releases Roadmap . The roadmap contains detailed information about the upcoming Visual Studio Orcas release, as well as a high level discussion of Rosario (the Team System release...