TechEd 2007: Presentation on Agile Software Development for small teams was a hit

clemmend — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 01:19:11 GMT

There was a session I forgot to mention from my post yesterday, but that was one of the best. Here is the complete summary so you have an idea of what was covered:

DEV02-TLC - Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Small Agile Teams

Monday, June 4 4:45 PM - 6:00 PM, Blue Theater 13

Speaker(s): Will Stott

Everyone says that Agile approaches like Extreme Programming only work when you’ve got a small team of highly talented developers. I agree that Agile works best for small teams, but it’s not talent that really matters, it’s a willingness to adopt certain practices and values. Over the next forty minutes I want to explain how Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) supports the Agile practices and values that allow everyone in this room to create a top performing small team. Topics to be covered include: • The case for creating small Agile teams – how Agile provides a middle-way between having too much process and too little • Adapting the Team Foundation Process Framework – how to create a light weight process for a small Agile team doing Extreme Programming. • Setting-up Team Foundation Build – why frequent integration is important and how to implement practices like ‘Continuous Integration’ and the ‘Ten Minute Build’ with TFB. • Test-driven Development – demonstration of the new VSTS Tools in a Pair-programming session (James Newkirk / Will Stott) with particular emphasis on Refactoring and writing good programmer tests. • Customer Testing using Generic Tests and FIT – how functional tests written by Customers in a Word document can be run as part of an automated build process to verify that your code satisfies its business requirements. James Newkirk and Will Stott have written a book entitled ‘Visual Studio Team System – Better Software Development for Agile Teams’ (700 pages) which Addison-Wesley will launch at Tech·Ed 2007. This book is targeted at people who want to know how VSTS might be used by a small team transitioning to Extreme Programming and includes a series of exercises which take readers through the entire software development lifecycle from inception to deployment.

I arrived there on time, and there were already as many people outside as inside the presentation space.

You could actually see people standing on top of chairs to see and hear what he was presenting. Some people watched the whole presentation while standing up, which is quite a compliment.

Doug Seven replaced Jim Newkirk as a co-presenter, as his flight was late.

Will and Jim had just launched their new book (as mentioned in the summary "‘Visual Studio Team System – Better Software Development for Agile Teams". The companion site (where you can get a link to buy it from Amazon.com) is here.

As part of this work, Will and Jim released a new software process template for Visual Studio Team System, MSF for XP.

I will blog again at length about this book later. Right now I can tell you though that this is one of the best books that you could buy at this moment if you are planning to adopt an Agile method with Visual Studio Team System.

TechEd 2007 starts...

clemmend — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:17:00 GMT

So today TechEd 2007 starts. I will be at the event helping on the Patterns and Practices booth, and also presenting on MSF for CMMI Process Improvement at the end of the week. Here is what I am planning to attend (my presentation included), all related in one way or another to MSF/software process:

ARC10-TLC - Agile Talk on Agility

Thursday, June 7 2:45 PM - 4:00 PM, Blue Theater 9

Speaker(s): Peter Provost

One of the best ways to learn about agile software development is by doing it. This talk is facilitated using an agile project management approach to prioritize and answer questions from the audience by a panel of agile experts. Do you have questions about TDD? About MSF-Agile? About who to manage risk and predictability on an agile project? Come experience agile first-hand and get your questions answered at the same time.

Track(s): Architecture

Level: 300

BOF08 - Microsoft Solutions Framework 4.0: A Year Later

Tuesday, June 5 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM, S331 A

Microsoft Solutions Framework 4.0 shipped in 2006 with Team Foundation Server. It's a lightweight process used to guide development for both Agile and "less Agile" teams. In this BOF we explore how to use it, how to customize it and how to adopt it, based from a one-year experience from different projects in different environments. The discussion will be based on practical experiences and we particularly invite people who have already used MSF 4.0 and those are starting to adopt it.

DEV01-TLC - Tips and Tricks for Editing Your Process Template

Friday, June 8 10:45 AM - 12:00 PM, Blue Theater 13

Speaker(s): Mickey Gousset

Many initial users of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System start with using the MSF Agile or MSF CMMI process templates. When companies begin to want to implement their own process templates, they can be a little daunted by the syntax and rules. This session hopes to change that perspective. This session covers several tips and tricks for editing your process template, showing some of the most common requests seen for changes to someone's process template. While this session explains the basics of editing your process template, it is not Process Template 101. Instead, it covers how to implement real-world requests for process template customization. It looks at process template customization through the lens of personal experience.

Track(s): Developer Tools and Technologies

Level: 300

DEV04-TLC - Demystifying CMMI Adoption with MSF for CMMI Process Improvement

Friday, June 8 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM, Blue Theater 13

Speaker(s): Clementino MENDONCA

Learn how to help customers adopt CMMI in organizations with a "Stretch to Fit" approach and "MSF for CMMI Process Improvement" methodology, and how its integration with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System/Team Foundation Server helps in satisfying SCAMPI assessment requirements.

Track(s): Developer Tools and Technologies

DEV210 - Microsoft Solutions Framework 4.0 Core and its Families

Friday, June 8 10:45 AM - 12:00 PM, N210 B

Speaker(s): Rafal Lukawiecki

For over 11 years Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) has been helping larger groups of developers deliver great software on time, on budget, and fully satisfying their customers—always! Being, perhaps, one of Microsoft’s best-kept secrets, MSF has grown a strong community also outside of the fields of software development, most notably in the area of infrastructure deployment. As the times moved on, it turned out that the larger community used MSF in a number of different ways, each benefiting different scenarios and applications. Agile and more formal practices grew in importance all around our industry. While Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System has already introduced two forms of MSF, known as MSF for Agile Software Development and MSF for CMM Integration Process Improvement, almost no one outside of a small group of people realize that Microsoft had been working on a wider group of MSF families. To keep all of the families cohesive, MSF 4.0 Core has been defined recently, and it forms the basis of all of the individual MSF families and instantiations. Indeed, while the Core has remained a framework, most of the actual instantiations have developed in-depth to become methodologies. This session gives you an overview of what is at the heart of all of those MSFs, the Core, and it shows you how some of the new concepts help structure efficient project teams. For the benefit of MSF v3 practitioners we point out the main version differences, but we concentrate on the new aspects, stressing the features of the Agile approach. As an important side benefit of attending this session you will see a few ways how you could improve your team’s efficiency, reduce the number of difficulties and make everyone feel happier working as a developer.

Track(s): Developer Tools and Technologies

Level: 200

DEV301 - Integrating the Database into the Application Lifecycle Using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals

Friday, June 8 2:45 PM - 4:00 PM, S210 E

Speaker(s): Duncan Davenport

Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals provides a new set of tools for working with databases throughout the development process and beyond. But just having tools is not enough. In order to reap the benefits of this new way of working with databases, you also need to embrace a new process for the way you do the work. In this session, we discuss the new MSF Agile and CMMI processes and show how with a combination of the new Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals tools and the adoption of slightly new processes, you can see significant benefits both in productivity and quality.

Track(s): Developer Tools and Technologies

Level: 300

The other sessions I will also be attending as possible are related to VSTS/process in one way or another. The ones in red are the most promising from the work I have been doing with the Patterns and Practices MSF Team:

BOF02 - Agile Development with .NET

Monday, June 4 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM, S331 A

Agile development methodologies are gaining more and more traction in the software industry. Join Jeffrey Palermo and many others for this popular BOF that has attracted 70+ attendees in past Tech·Eds. We discuss basic principles of Agile development including people over process and delivering working software at the beginning of a project, not just at the end. We share common successes and challenges from all the attendees, so bring your story.

BOF52 - The Need for an Agile Project Planning Tool

Tuesday, June 5 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM, N310 E

In the world of Agile Project management, no single tool has emerged as being the de facto standard for Agile Project Planning and Management. In this session, we discuss the need for such a tool and how such a tool can extend the value expressed in tools such as Team System.

Track(s): Developer Tools and Technologies

Level: 200

BOF63 - Creating Flexible Software: TDD, Mocking, and Dependency Injection

Tuesday, June 5 7:45 PM - 8:45 PM, N320 A

There has been much discussion of agile development techniques, but what do they really mean? How can they help you develop better software that is more flexible in the face of change? What does it mean for software to be flexible? This Birds of a Feather session promotes a lively discussion of how to be successful in creating software that is resilient in the face of ever-changing business requirements.

Track(s): Developer Tools and Technologies

Level: 400

DEV11-TLC - Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and Software Factories

Monday, June 4 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM, Blue Theater 13

Speaker(s): Jack Greenfield

In this chalk talk, Jack Greenfield, co-author of the Software Factories book, talks about the current generation of factories from p&p, future directions for software factories in Visual Studio Team Architect, and integrating software factories with other parts of Visual Studio Team System. The second half of the session will be Q&A, addressing questions from the audience on these topics.

Track(s): Developer Tools and Technologies

ARC13-TLC - Adopting Process One Bite at a Time

Wednesday, June 6 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM, Blue Theater 9

Speaker(s): Ivar Jacobson, David West

In this chalk talk Dr. Ivar Jacobson and David West describe a series of innovative new ideas that enable practitioners to effectively deploy, configure, and use process. They introduce the concept of a practice, and show how practices can be used to ‘cut up’ heavy, often irrelevant processes creating ‘developer friendly’ process guidance into smaller, digestible chunks. The session provides a framework for thinking about practices, a set of ideas for structuring a practice, an approach to delivering practices and a mechanism for people to use them all from within inside the Visual Studio Team System environment. This is a very interactive whiteboard type session providing the audience with the chance to ask questions of the father of the Unified Process and Use Cases on the next big thing in process.

Track(s): Architecture

Level: 300

ARC305 - Practice-Centric Software Development with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

Wednesday, June 6 5:30 PM - 6:45 PM, S230 A

Speaker(s): Ivar Jacobson, David West

Today there are many methods, processes, techniques, etc. that attempt to help project teams conduct their work. While there are indeed some important differences between them, the commonalities are far greater—the end goal is for all of us to get working software. Thus adopting complete processes does not make practical sense. Instead the focus should be on the ability to mix and match ideas from many different sources inside or outside our own world and compose these ideas to get a better way to work. Over the years we have more and more come to realize that these separate ideas are well represented by practices. Practices are first class citizens—process is just a composition of practices. Practices are to software development teams what use cases are to software systems: they have a beginning and an end and they provide identifiable values to the stakeholders. Practices come from individuals from different camps around the world, such as from the agile camp or the process improvement camp. In this session, gain an understanding of a practice-centric view of software development, as and how that relates to developing software using .NET applications. We examine the core essential practices that are critical to success and how these can be created using templates within Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

Track(s): Architecture

Level: 300

DEV309 - Best Practices for Team-Based Software Development

Tuesday, June 5 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM, N310 A

Speaker(s): Joel Semeniuk

A highly cohesive software development team is critical to a successful project. In this session, we examine all of the different ways teams members, from project managers to developers and QA, can work together to help enhance team collaboration, and ultimately process success. We then take a look at how these opportunities map into Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and other Microsoft products to show you how you can take advantage of these best practices on your teams today.

Track(s): Developer Tools and Technologies

Level: 300

See you there.

Adventures in Software Engineering : TechEd

TechEd 2007: Presentation on Agile Software Development for small teams was a hit

TechEd 2007 starts...