As I mentioned in an earlier post , I am now working on the Microsoft Dynamics Ax product team. I plan to start posting on topics closely related to the product and felt an upfront post with a brief product overview and some context would be helpful....

Check out the MSDN Tester Center for helpful information for software testers and the software testing discipline! The material includes whiteboard videos, blogs, technical articles, book reviews, and a variety of other resources.

One of the great debates in the Software Test Engineering world involves the optimal mix of automated testing and manual testing. Like all good debates in software engineering, there are the religious fanatics that position themselves at either end of...

I moved into this Test Manager gig a little over a year ago. I also stopped posting consistently to this blog about that time. Coincidence? I think not… Another event that happened in the past year is that my team was re-org'd into the Microsoft Dynamics...

Since joining Microsoft almost six years ago, I have enjoyed the columns written by I.M. Wright. I.M. is the alter ego of our Director of Development Excellence, Eric Brechner. His columns always bring a smile to my face while drilling home a key point...

A co-worker pointed out this article from the MSN Careers site. Fargo was rated #1 in a list of "15 Great Cities for Job Seekers". When are you going to check it out? We have openings on our team for Software Developers…

Conway's Law states that "Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it. " Further, Conway's Law is identified as a key pattern in Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development , stating "Make sure that the organization...

As a follow on to my As Agile As Possible post, here's a recent blog entry from David Anderson on Large Scale Agile Development . He references another article from Scott Ambler on scaling agile, this time focused on how architecture enables scaling of...

Plan Driven vs. Agile , ScrumBut , Good Agile, Bad Agile – there's a constant dialogue going on regarding what is agile, if you are truly being agile, if agile is good or evil, if you are following or violating the rules, etc. This debate especially comes...

Trust is like earning interest in a bank. It can take forever to earn it, but you can lose it in a moment of spending. I can't recall where I picked up the paraphrased quote in above – it was in somebody's blog that I read and it was in the last year...

My new role as our team's Test Manager marks the fourth team that I've managed in the past 13 years of leading software teams. The transitions have always been a time when I'm forced to step back to think about what I want to accomplish as a team leader...

Steve McConnell has a new book out, Software Estimation – Demystifying the Black Art . While I’ve only read the first chapter, I found some interesting content. Say you’ve estimated and planned a project to complete in 20 weeks. Twenty weeks later,...

The weather is cooling, school has started, and the long, warm days of summer are starting to fade from my mind. It’s hard to believe that fall is upon us, but it is. It also means that my seemingly annual hiatus from blogging must end and I must get...

Brad Appleton’s post on Trustworthy Transparency over Tiresome Traceability hit close to home. I believe there are some good ideas behind this that my team can leverage for its release wide planning efforts. Take a look at what Brad has to say as well...

While doing some blog reading about TechEd, I kept running across the term “mash-up”. While the term and the context have given me a decent idea of what a mashup is, I decided to look it up. Wikipedia defines a mashup as “a website or web application...

This is the last week for Super Early Bird Registration for the Agile 2006 Conference . It is being held from July 23-26 th in Minneapolis. I attended the conference last year (see my recap ) and found it a great conference to challenge traditional...

Since my overall team changed divisions last fall and my feature team took on a new area , it’s been a struggle to get into much of a development rhythm. The different feature teams working in Fargo were all at a different place in their learning curve...

The Major League Baseball season is finally underway!! This never used to be a major event in my year, but that was before I joined a Fantasy Baseball league last year. I was hesitant to do so because I was worried about the time commitment. But I found...

I’ve posted multiple times about the importance of self managed teams in Scrum, including my last post . Through a recent non-Scrum experience, I think I’ve discovered the ultimate test in developing self managed skills for a ScrumMaster… please read...

Scrum continues to gain traction within Microsoft. While it initially started with a grassroots movement in teams, Scrum's success has resulted in it being more frequently being initiated from the top down. I did a small, informal survey of people on...

Customization is a very broad topic. One thing that our predecessors working on MBF Customization did was create a Modification Taxonomy. This taxonomy helps to break down the topic and gives us some vocabulary for discussion. Here are the key elements...

We spent two hours last night destroying what many of us spent many hours building for Engineering Competition #2 – Tower Building . As was the case last year, the winner was the event host, Michael (aka ‘Mary’, see comment in this post ). Several...

Have you ever found yourself collecting information on your process, but are unsure exactly what to do with the information? We had a discussion about a metric like this in the past week and it reminded me of a good technique to help avoid this situation...

It’s that time of year again. My co-worker, Michael, has once again concocted a mid-winter competition to challenge our minds and our sanity. Last year, it was a Bridge Building contest. You can read about the results of this competition here . The...

The title of this post seems so obvious, yet also seems like the Holy Grail. Why should it be so hard for a customer to get software that aligns with the way that he runs his business without paying a fortune for it? And if he was so fortunate to get...