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...

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...

The concept of the Scrum Daily Meeting is really quite simple. All that each person needs to do is answer the three simple questions (What have you done? What do you plan to do? What impediments do you have?) and everybody is back to work in 15 minutes...

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...

One of my co-workers decided to have a bridge building contest. Why, you might ask? I’m not exactly sure myself, but nevertheless, several of us decided it was a worthy endeavor and signed up to participate. The parts list is as follows: · 3’ ¼ round...

When we started with Scrum a year ago, we decided that our sprints should work on the calendar month. Specifically, the sprint ended on the last Thursday of the month and started the following Monday. That means some sprints were 4 weeks and some were...

It’s time for Archie to come out of the closet, …. err, workshop. Who is Archie? Archie is the name of my bridge for the bridge building contest that I recently blogged about. With the competition coming up tomorrow, I think it’s safe to talk about Archie...

A new white paper, “Testing best practices for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012”, is now available on the Microsoft Download Center, PartnerSource, and CustomerSource.  The Download Center link is http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27565...

We are currently in the end game for one of our internal development milestones. We completed feature work a few weeks ago and are now in a mode of final cross subsystem integration, completing test development, and wrapping up bug fixing. What practices...

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...

I spent last week out in Redmond visiting Microsoft headquarters. I usually make it out a couple times a year and have a full week of meeting with different people. While I never specifically go out to talk about Agile development and Scrum, quite a bit...

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 any given time, we have 4 to 8 active Scrum teams working in our MBF-Fargo team. The size of each team ranges from 4 to around 10. Most, if not all, of the teams are working on the same milestone and the same sprint cycle. One area that we have been...

The bridges have been broken, and egos have been bolstered or bruised as appropriate. Here’s a recap of Bridge Breaking Night. The bridges in the competition The bridge test stand. Sand flowed from the bucket on top to the hanging “bucket” below. With...

In Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed , Barry Boehm and Richard Turner contrast Plan Driven and Agile software development processes. A Plan Driven process is associated with defined process, process improvement, heavy documentation...

In my last post on Multi Team Sprint Reviews, I forgot to mention one very important part of our sprint review process. Unlike the core sprint review process, this element has stayed very stable over the past year. After each sprint review, we hold a...

I am taking a two day course this week on Unit Testing, Test Driven Development, and Refactoring put on by Net Objectives . Our instructor, Rob Myers, has a fair amount of experience working as an Extreme Programming coach. In an interesting twist to...

Setting Sprint Goals My DevDiv counterpart, Chris Flaat , recently had a post on their Sprint 5 Planning . He ends the post with a discussion on goal setting for a sprint. This is a topic that we've struggled with in our teams' Scrum planning, so it’s...

In my last post , I told you about Archie – my bridge for the bridge building contest tomorrow night. I want to tell you a little bit about my development process for Archie in this post and see if it sounds familiar. Armed with some basic tools and skills...

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...

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...

As I mentioned in my previous post , Dynamics AX has an integrated development environment and a specialized language called X++. Inspired by the usefulness of 'xUnit' based frameworks like JUnit and NUnit, the developers for Dynamics AX 4.0 (released...

One of the things that I really enjoy is playing basketball. There are multiple morning and noon pickup games at a nearby health club that several Microsoft team members attend. It’s a good mix of younger and older players; I’m a proud member of the latter...

As a result of my post on Scrum Teams that are “In the Flow”, I’ve had some conversations about teams that are NOT in the flow. What are the characteristics of a team that is not in the flow for a sprint? Here are some: Vague goals Poor quality...

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...