Blaine Wastell - patterns & practices client architecture guidance : p&p Agile Process

pnp Summit Videos Available online

blaine — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 21:48:09 GMT

Ajoy just announced that 3 p&p summit video's are now available on-line. He provides a link to a presentation that Francis and I gave regarding SharePoint Guidance. Check it out.

Announcing 6 new patterns and practices releases

blaine — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:28:52 GMT

The patterns & practices team just published 6 new releases in the last two weeks. Ajoy discusses the releases on his blog. The new releases include:

Enterprise Library v4.1
Unity Application Block v1.2
Distributed Agile Development white paper and Agile showcase
Application Architecture Guide v2.0 (Beta 1)
SharePoint Development Guidance v1.0
Acceptance Testing Guidance

Check out the new guidance as there is truly lots of new and useful guidance.

Unit Testing SharePoint Projects

blaine — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:38:20 GMT

Since we started the SharePoint Guidance project, I have heard from most customers that they do not unit test their SharePoint projects because it is hard to do. In our drop that will come out tomorrow or Wednesday on Codeplex we have some good content on how to unit test applications built with SharePoint. This guidance started with a recent blog by Francis Cheung.

Check out the blog and the CodePlex drop as it is quite useful if you are trying to understand how to unit test SharePoint Applications. Let us know your thoughts on the guidance. Is it easy to understand? Will you use in on your current or next SharePoint project?

View Web Client Software Factory Documentation on MSDN

blaine — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:13:38 GMT

As I mentioned in my previous blog, a complete copy of WCSF February 2008 release's documentation is now available to view on MSDN. Let us know your thoughts of viewing the documentation on MSDN. As an fyi, it will take some time for the links and content to replicate to all the servers worldwide. If you do not see the documentation, try back in a few hours.

You can navigate to the documentation using MSDN's Left Navigation:

Or you can access the documentation from WCSF home page on MSDN --> www.msdn.com/webclientfactory and scroll to the documentation section on the home page.

Glenn and Blaine Interviewed about patterns & practices

blaine — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:23:45 GMT

Glenn and I were interviewed a few weeks back by howsoftwareisbuilt.com. Glenn's blog mentions the different people that are interview on their site including Michael Tiemann, Jay Pipes, Matt Gibbs and Shawn Burke.

The subject of this interview was about patterns & practices, how we develop software, and how we are different. We talked about our Customer-Connected Engineering strategy, how we deliver guidance and our contrib. communities.

You can read the interview here.

Wanted: by SCSF and WCSF Communities

blaine — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 08:30:33 GMT

We need you to get coding and help extend the patterns & practices deliverables. Have you gone and checked out the SCSF and WCSF contrib community sites yet? If not why not? Both Tom and Glenn announced the contrib sites a few weeks past and we need your help to contribute to these sites.

But seriously, I am amazed by the good things the community has done over the past years with the p&p deliverables. The community asked for ways they can give these amazing things to the rest of the community and now there is a way. The good news as Bill Simser states in his blog is the contrib sites are run by the community.

Thank you Tom and Glenn for getting these community contrib sites up and running. Before officially starting at p&p, I asked Glenn if he would get the client program contrib sites operational - as they say the rest is history. To make this vision truly operational we do need your help. They will be as good as you make them. So as Tom stated in his blog, get coding.

Reflections on SCSF Iteration 3

blaine — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 20:08:52 GMT

The team achieved its objectives for the week with the exception of finishing the WPF interop spikes and finalizing the Appraiser Workbench Reference Implementation. Overall, we are happy with our progress. This week we prioritized WPF spikes high because it is a critical feature for SCSF release.

From this past iteration, we identified two areas that will focus on:

Obtaining community feedback on the planned SCSF release and our early code drops. This week we are looking for feedback on:

WCF support. Is there anything else you need besides the Offline Block?
WPF Interop Requirements. What do you want WPF Interop to do for you. We outlined two spikes on the community site: a) WPF Parts hosted by Windows Forms and b) WPF Workspace hosted by Windows Forms. We know that a many of you are developing WPF-only applications. We are hopeful that the core platform will address this scenario.
Review of code generation strategy. We continue to recieve good feedback from the community on what works and what does not with our recipes. Let us know if you have additional code generation requirements that we need to consider for the release.

Fixing our build process.

Our build process does not currently run our unit tests and automated acceptance tests.
Fix the Object Builder versioning issue that caused issues when compiling the Appraiser Workbench RI and the Disconnected Service Agent QuickStart. The cause seems to be a conflict between the version we are using and the version EntLib 3.0 is using.

As an fyi, The WCF and WPF support are the highest rated issues on Codeplex. If there are other items you want us to include, go vote now as we do look at the votes when considering what to work on.

Reflections on SCSF Iteration 2

blaine — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 04:09:42 GMT

During Iteration 2 we made a conscience decision to be more transparent with the community. We in patterns & practices hear a lot of questions on how do you develop software and what are you working on right now for a particular asset.

In response to these requests, we are publishing the SCSF Release 2 Stories and SCSF Release 2 Results on Codeplex as we go. I am also sharing my thoughts on the the past iteration on this blog. I hope that providing this information will give you a better insight into the team and both our successes and failures. I am interested in hearing if these vehicles provide value to you and your team as you evaluate and use the client assets.

Iteration 2 highlights

Good

Success criteria: during Iteration 2 Planning we added success criteria to help the team focus on "what good looked like"
First weekly drop: the team published its first weekly drop to Codeplex for customer review and feedback

Bad or Ugly

Weekly drop painful to get out: publishing our weekly drops seem to be painful to get out. Even as we continue to invest in our build and publishing infrastructure, this seems to take more time than any of us would like
Daily stand-ups did not provide visibility into weekly commitment status: As the PM, I did not have a good idea if we were going to make our iterations commitments. After reading "It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings", I realized that we need to change the questions we answered in the daily stand-up to:

Was I able to fulfill what I committed to?
What am I comfortable committing to today?
What is obstructing me in meeting my commitments?

It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings is a great resource for identifying ways to improve your stand-up meetings. Here are two other quotes that hit home for me:

"Daily stand-ups are meetings. Like all meetings, participants have a responsibility to prepare."
"Good stand-ups will feel supportive. When people are knocked down every time they raise a problem, they will tend to stop raising problems. Beyond preventing removal of obstacles, a non-supportive stand-up works against team dynamics. The stand-up instead becomes a ritual that team members dread [LaPlante, 2003]."

Do you have similar experiences? Do you have other sources that we can all use to improve our stand-up meetings?

SCSF first weekly drop

blaine — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:44:00 GMT

Take a look at our SCSF's first weekly drop. In Mike Puleio's blog, he outlines what was accomplished during this past iteration. As I mentioned in a previous blog, in an effort to be more transparent, we are posting the iteration's goals on Codeplex.

Let us know your thoughts? Next week we will post some topics on the codeplex discussion list to get your feedback on the Offline Block. So please respond.

Publish planned SCSF stories for an iteration on codeplex

blaine — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 08:46:00 GMT

We created a page to list the planned SCSF stories for an iteration. This page will give you an idea of what we will be working on for the week.

At the end of this week, we will post our first weekly drop on codeplex. If all goes as planned, we will post it at the end of day on Friday. If we run into too many challenges, we will post it on Monday.

Reflections on SCSF Iteration 1

blaine — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 21:07:56 GMT

The SCSF team just finished its first iteration and conducted its iteration planned meeting for iteration 2. During our iteration planning sessions, the team conducts a weekly retrospective that allows us to make small course corrections for the next iteration.

During this weeks retrospective, one point became very clear. We as a team did not identify what consistuted a successful first iteration. From my past experience, identifying acceptance criteria is an activity that is easy to skip. Have you had a similar experience? How have you solved this problem on your projects.

The good news for our team is we have different members that recognize the problem and raise the issue during the planning game and the retrospective. For this next iteration we identified acceptance criteria for the Disconnected Service Agent, Recipes, and the upcoming WCSF Workshop.

An example of the acceptance criteria for the recipes are:

Create solution, create business module, create view/presenter, and create foundational module compile and run after they are registered
Recipes are included in the weekly drop to codeplex

We will continue to refine our acceptance criteria. I am interested in hearing your feedback and thoughts on "What good looks like".