Four years ago, I was asking myself the question in the title. After 15 years in the Minneapolis area, my family was seriously considering a job offer to join Microsoft in Fargo. I wasn’t really job hunting, and we certainly weren’t looking to move out...

Over the last week or so there has been a long lived thread on the Yahoo Scrum Discussion Group titled “Is it People over Process or Tool Time?”. I have to admit that I’ve only paid very cursory attention to this thread, but it has motivated me to blog...

A while back, I posted about the demise of the Microsoft Business Framework and our team’s move back to the Business Solutions organization. I wanted to give you an update on our move and let you know our new team name. The team name is Dynamics Tools...

I would be remiss if I did not follow up yesterday's post with an update on the first winter storm of the year in Fargo-Moorhead. It turns out that this one was a bit of doozy. The freezing rain caused a bunch of electrical poles to snap due to the...

I heeded the advice of the weathermen who advised no travel today and didn't go into the office. We are expecting 5-10" of snow and strong winds over the next 18 hours or so, so I think staying home to work is a good plan. School was cancelled today as...

I was reminded this afternoon of one my favorite ways of thinking about software development, that it is a 'cooperative game of invention and communication' . Alistair Cockburn is the author of this and you can read more about it here . The longer version...

If you haven't heard about it, Doug Burgum is stepping aside as the leader of the Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) group. After a successor is found, he will become the Chairman of MBS with a focus on evangelizing our products and services worldwide...

Last week, eWeek published an article titled Microsoft Lauds 'Scrum' Method for Software Project . David Treadwell, a Corporate Vice President in the Developer Division, has some quotes on the growing use of Scrum and other agile methods at Microsoft...

When I first heard the analogy between what happens in the military with what we want to do from an agile project management perspective, I was skeptical. But after I've had it explained to me by a peer a couple of times, I understand and agree with the...

I am leaving on a trip to visit our office in Copenhagen tomorrow. One of my goals is to visit with some teams in my peer group over there that have recently started to use Scrum. That started me thinking about how I would know if Scrum is helping their...

It is with mixed emotions that I pass along new information regarding the state of the Microsoft Business Framework (MBF). As reported by Mary Jo Foley , MBF is no longer going to be shipped as a framework in a future release of Visual Studio. The...

At the Agile 2005 conference, I attended a session given by Mike Cohn on Release and Iteration Planning (see blog post ). In Mike’s session, he introduced ‘Planning Poker’ as a fast track approach for using Wideband Delphi for doing high level estimates...

I had the opportunity this week to spend a couple of hours talking about agile processes with several people from Sundog . Sundog is a local consulting company with about 20 developers. They help companies by developing solutions for system integration...

Innovation is clearly a good thing. Customers love innovative products – the iPod and the whole industry supporting it is a great example. Management loves innovative thinking to improve internal processes – the whole agile movement in software development...

One concept that I heard frequently at Agile 2005 was Technical Debt (see definition ). Ward Cunningham apparently originated this metaphor and I think it's a helpful way to think about some of the things that happen in day to day development efforts...

In my What I Want to Accomplish at Agile 2005 post, I outlined my goals for the week in Denver. Now that the last session has been held, the last beverage drank at the banquet, and I'm back in Minnesota, it's time to review those goals and see if they...

Mike Cohn’s session on Release and Iteration Planning was the session that I was looking forward to more than any other at the conference. I have read some of his work and feel he brings a very pragmatic approach to agile development, particularly in...

Day 2 at Agile 2005 was another good day. It was capped with a Rockies game and some play time at ESPNZone, so this post is getting out a little later than planned. The highlight of the day for me was a tutorial on Lean Software Development by Mary...

My first day at Agile 2005 was a good one! I attended the morning keynote delivered by Brian Marick and Bob Martin in the morning. The afternoon tutorial that I attended was Agile Project Management: Reliable Innovation , delivered by Jim Highsmith. This...

Following the lead of Brian Marick's post on the Agile 2005 conference in Denver next week, here's my list of what I want to accomplish. Thankfully, I don't have to survive a keynote address like Brian does! Continue to evolve my thinking on being...

My blogging pace has slowed down lately as some summer time distractions have limited my time for this activity. Given that it’s Friday afternoon before a long weekend, maybe it’s time for a post that ventures off of software development to some of those...

One of the biggest benefits of Scrum is the empirical nature of it. From the perspective of improving an individual team’s process, the Sprint Retrospective is a critical element of this. I’ve run quite a few of these meetings and feel they can be done...

I had the privilege of participating in a presentation discussing some of the MBF engineering and project management practices to a few senior leaders on the Visual Studio team last week. Using a theme of a “Quality Ecosystem”, we covered a variety of...

As I write this, I am in the air somewhere over Wyoming (or some other desolate location with mountainous terrain). I’m also crammed into a window seat that was supposed to be an exit row. Well, it’s not and the other two 6’ plus gentlemen in my row were...

One aspect of our process that is more on the Plan Driven end of our Agile / Plan Driven scale (see Agile AND Plan Driven ) is our documentation and review process for requirements, design, threat modeling, and other non-code artifacts. Being a large...