Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
provides you with the software development tooling to deliver continuous value
from requirements to production. It’s a complete integrated, highly flexible,
suite that will help you reduce barriers and reduce cycle times; and, of course,
produce great solutions.

Check out my video on

WintellectNOW. In the video we take a walk through Visual Studio ALM and
Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2013. Then I show you how to get started with ALM
in your shop for both on premises and Visual Studio Online.

Sign up for WintellectNOW with promo code VINCENT-14.

SoCal Code Camp Los Angeles starts tomorrow. Scheduling speakers was interesting and engaging. We have a great response this year (749 rsvp’s as I write this) and sessions will be packed. Get there early.

I’ll be presenting three sessions. Here they are:

One More Time: Scrum Fundamentals

12:15 PM – Saturday, November 09, 2013

Scrum is the most used agile framework for managing software development. Can Scrum help you deliver successful projects? You first have to understand the fundamentals of Scrum. This recently refreshed session will pragmatically explore using Scrum. We’ll talk about what how to get started adopting Scrum, what kinds of organizational commitments are needed and how to scale Scrum for very large projects.

Scrum is incredibly simple on the surface but touches profoundly on people, process and technology. What should you expect if you do it right, and what if you don’t? Join our discussion and tune-up your Scrum knowledge. It all starts with understanding the Scrum Fundamentals.

Here’s the presentation download link.

Moving Your Organization into the Fast Lane – Delighting Your Customers

Organizations today want to be more responsive to their marketplace opportunities, more productive and more efficient; they want to be agile. Many have implemented agile practices for improving software development. But if you want to move out of traffic and into the fast lane it requires leadership that emphasizes creating, satisfying and delighting customers every day.

This session focuses on leadership techniques for delighting your customers that you can take back and put to use. You will learn how a culture of delighting customers is built around a work force characterized by high levels of productivity, continuous innovation, and elevated levels of sustained motivation and job satisfaction. Your customers are your lifeblood; it’s not enough just to satisfy them. You need them sharing their delight with others, sharing opportunities with you, and coming back again and again.

Move into the fast lane! Focus your organization on delighting your customers on a continuous long-term basis. It’s hard work but immensely rewarding.

Here’s the presentation download link.

Managing Self-Organizing Teams – An Old School Management Dilemma

Two of the principles of the Agile Manifesto are Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done; and the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

The Scrum Guide says “Scrum Teams are self-organizing and cross-functional. Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team.”

The game has changed. So, how do you manage self-organizing teams? And, what do we do with traditional managers? That’s what this session is all about. We want our teams to be highly productive, to grow professionally, to enjoy their work and be in it for the long haul. All while being good organizational citizens and driving on the proper side of the road. We’ll cover a little management theory on motivation and maintaining a positive, healthy work environment and I’ll show you how to put it to work.

Get ready for some serious management re-factoring.

Here’s the presentation download link.

SoCal Code Camp Los Angeles is coming November 9 & 10. As of this writing we are at 97 sessions and should break 100 in a day or so. This year we have a great variety of topics across platforms, technologies and practices. If you want to present a session you can still sign up before November 1. If you are planning on attending, please register and indicate the sessions you want to attend. I’m handling scheduling again this year and pre event registration really helps coordinating rooms and times in order to accommodate as many people as possible.

Agile 2103 is almost here. Close to 1,700 active Agilists from 40+ countries, will converge to learn, share, and collaborate at this unique annual gathering. I’ll be presenting Monday August 5 at 2:00 pm. As you can see from the title of my talk, I’m focusing on delighting your customers. It’s the new bottom line for organizations for agile enterprises. I’m really glad to see several other presentations at this year’s Agile also focusing on customer delight.

Moving Your Organization into the Fast Lane – Delighting Your Customers

Organizations today want to be more responsive to their marketplace opportunities, more productive and more efficient; they want to be agile. Many have implemented agile practices for improving software development. But if you want to move out of traffic and into the fast lane it requires leadership that emphasizes creating, satisfying and delighting customers every day.

This session focuses on leadership techniques for delighting your customers that you can take back and put to use. You will learn how a culture of delighting customers is built around a work force characterized by high levels of productivity, continuous innovation, and elevated levels of sustained motivation and job satisfaction.

Your customers are your lifeblood; it’s not enough just to satisfy them. You need them sharing their delight with others, sharing opportunities with you, and coming back again and again.

Move into the fast lane! Focus your organization on delighting your customers on a continuous long-term basis. It’s hard work but immensely rewarding.

 Hope to see you there. Here’s the download link for the presentation slide deck.

San Diego code camp, July 27 and 28, is almost here. We have 104 sessions scheduled. We will be in the UCSD Extension area like in past years. The rooms are small and demand is high, so get there early.

I’m doing three sessions focused on moving the principles of Scrum to running an enterprise:

Moving Your Organization into the Fast Lane – Delighting Your Customers

Mike Vincent 
<!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–>
<!–[endif]–>

1:30 PM – Saturday, July 27, 2013

Scrum | organization change | motivation | managing people | leadership | delighting customers | culture change

Location: 106

Organizations today want to be more responsive to their marketplace opportunities, more productive and more efficient; they want to be agile. Many have implemented agile practices for improving software development. But if you want to move out of traffic and into the fast lane it requires leadership that emphasizes creating, satisfying and delighting customers every day.

This session focuses on leadership techniques for delighting your customers that you can take back and put to use.  You will learn how a culture of delighting customers is built around a work force characterized by high levels of productivity, continuous innovation, and elevated levels of sustained motivation and job satisfaction.

Your customers are your lifeblood; it’s not enough just to satisfy them. You need them sharing their delight with others, sharing opportunities with you, and coming back again and again.

Move into the fast lane! Focus your organization on delighting your customers on a continuous long-term basis. It’s hard work but immensely rewarding.

Managing Self-Organizing Teams – An Old School Management Dilemma

Mike Vincent 
<!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–>
<!–[endif]–>

2:45 PM – Saturday, July 27, 2013

team | self-organization | Scrum Master | motivation | Management | leadership | coaching

Location: 106

Two of the principles of the Agile Manifesto are Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done; and the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

The Scrum Guide says “Scrum Teams are self-organizing and cross-functional. Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team.”

The game has changed. So, how do you manage self-organizing teams? And, what do we do with traditional managers? That’s what this session is all about. We want our teams to be highly productive, to grow professionally, to enjoy their work and be in it for the long haul. All while being good organizational citizens and driving on the proper side of the road. We’ll cover a little management theory on motivation and maintaining a positive, healthy work environment and I’ll show you how to put it to work.

Get ready for some serious management re-factoring.

Moving Your Organization into the Fast Lane – Making Scrum Stick

Mike Vincent 
<!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–>
<!–[endif]–>

4:00 PM – Saturday, July 27, 2013

Scrum | organization change | motivation | managing people | leadership | delighting customers | culture change

Location: 106

Organizations today want to be more responsive to their marketplace opportunities, more productive and more efficient; they want to be agile. Many have implemented Scrum for improving software development but the rest of the enterprise remains stuck with old waterfall habits and management practices. Over time even the improvements in software development are compromised and everyone slides back into the old way of doing things.

This session discusses how to break from this old “organizational gravity” by embracing the concepts of Scrum at the organizational level to build toward the realization of a truly agile enterprise. An enterprise characterized by new levels of productivity, continuous innovation, a work force with elevated levels of sustained motivation and job satisfaction, and delighted customers on a continuous long term basis. I call it making Scrum stick.

Making Scrum stick is a big change of culture for most organizations. It requires adopting new ways of doing things and forgetting the old. It requires a new focus on leadership, the active commitment of the entire organization, a change of how we manage and treat people, and an emphasis on creation and satisfaction of customers.

Embrace Scrum for your whole organization; move into the fast lane. It’s hard work but immensely rewarding.

 You can download the presentations from Media on this site http://mvasoftware.com/media/g/presentations/default.aspx?Sort=PostDate&PageIndex=1.

Here’s a quick self-evaluation to see if you are doing Scrum. It’s based on Scrum as described in the Scrum Guide.

The Scrum Test (1 of 3)

Do these exist?

·         Product Owner, Development Team, and Scrum Master

·         Ordered Product Backlog

·         Sprint Backlog showing remaining work

·         Sprints of 1 month or less

The Scrum Test (2 of 3)

Are these created?

·         Sprint Backlog in Sprint Planning

·         Daily Plan in the Daily Scrum

·         Usable and working Increment each Sprint

·         Usable and working Increment each Sprint

The Scrum Test (3 of 3)

Do these happen each Sprint?

·         Stakeholders inspect the Increment

·         Sprint Retrospective

A simple measurable checklist

1.    an ordered Product Backlog

2.    Development Teams of 6+-3, self-organizing

3.    have a Product Owner who owns the backlog

4.    a Scrum Master who is responsible for process

5.    have Sprints of 1 month or less

6.    Sprints are of a fixed length

7.    a Sprint Backlog that shows Remaining Work

8.    a Sprint Backlog created at Sprint Planning

9.    working software each Sprint

10. stakeholders who inspect the software increment

11. review & Retrospective at the end of each sprint

Pass the test? If no, then you know what to work on. And if yes, then congratulations. You are on the road to continuous improvement but this is just the start. There are always new opportunities.

I frequently recommend the ALM Ranger’s Branching and Merging Guidance to clients as a base of understanding when evolving a strategy that best meets the client’s source control needs. When working with agile methodologies like Scrum, the right strategy can help you raise the bar on quality and efficiency while cutting potential waste.

So, what’s the big deal on a branching and merging strategy using Scrum instead of waterfall?  The short answer is simplicity and continuous integration. Overall I stress the importance of simplicity. It is one of the principles of the Agile Manifesto;  Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.

Let’s start with the simplest strategy: Develop on the Mainline. For a small team and simple projects this may be all that you need.  You should Label all important builds and releases; anything you might go back to.

•       Ensures that all code is continuously integrated

•       Ensures that developers pick up each others’ changes immediately

•       Avoids “merge hell” and “integration hell” at end of the project

For more complex projects you’ll want more isolation of stable released and potentially releasable code from day-to-day development activity. The Basic Branch Plan addresses that. Main contains stable code for testing and potentially releasable increments meeting the team’s definition of done. 

The Development branch provides isolation for day-to-day development work. As code is developed, unit tested and integration tested it can be merged into Main for functional and user acceptance testing. Everyone codes and checks in to Development. Enabling continuous integration or gated check-in builds ensures that everything builds and stays integrated as it is checked in. CI builds should include some test automation like all unit tests. Nightly builds should include automated integration tests. Consider also including layer validation and code analysis.

While labels on Main is a simple way to track releases, a release branch provides isolation for code actually put into production. This helps for rapid response in the event show stopping issues/bugs are discovered. It also provides an easy audit trail if you include a snapshot of everything required to rebuild the release including component code and relevant architectural artifacts.

Additional releases can be supported by labels identifying specific release drops on a continuous release branch or by additional peer release branches from Main. Your specific operational requirements should be your guide as to which option is best.

As a general guideline, always strive for simplicity. Branching is easy while merging is hard, especially if you don’t do it often. So, check in development work frequently; at least every day. When checking in, as a best practice, you should associate your check-in with one work item. Check-ins against multiple work items make things hard to track later on and suggests not focusing on one sprint backlog item at a time.

For releases, if a hotfix is required, you can quickly create a HotFix branch from Release, make the code fix, test it, and put in to production. Always follow up with a merge back to Main and from Main to Development so your whole code base is up to date. At this point, the HotFix branch is done, it has served its purpose so turn it off by locking. Here is a Basic Branch Plan, Web Option where the HotFix branch is created only if needed.

For packaged software planning for Service Packs and Hot Fixes might be more appropriate by creating the branches along with the release branch as detailed in the ALM Rangers guidance.

Don’t try to “boil the ocean” by having too many things going on at once. How does this show up in source control? Feature branches are a typical smell. Typically feature branches are an indication that product backlog items haven’t been decomposed sufficiently to produce working increments of functionality in a single sprint. Occasionally there may be times when you need the isolation of a branch within a sprint; so do it if you need to but frequently merge other development activity to keep changes small and more easily managed when you integrate back. Good decomposition of PBI’s and SBI’s minimizes the need for feature isolation. Get it in one sprint.

And, don’t create test branches. You need good test environments, either physical or virtualized where you can deploy new builds at least daily for functional and user acceptance testing but branching for test is extra work and complexity. Labels provide everything you need.

For multiple Scrum teams integrating work continuously is really important, in order to avoid “merge hell,” but requires some hard work. You should try to all work from the same Development branch. It will require extra work frequently getting latest and merging changes from other teams. This realistically works when there is some functional separation in PBI’s that each team works on and good scrum of scrums interaction. There probably will come a time when you need separate team branches. That implies even more hard work for frequent merging and scrum of scrums communication. Continuous integration is a must do. Don’t defer team integration until the end of a sprint.

Here are some architectural considerations to compliment an agile source control strategy:

• Keeping Your Application Releasable

•  Continuous Integration

  • Continuous Delivery Strategies

  • Hide new functionality until it is finished

  • Make all changes incrementally as a series

  • Use branch by abstraction for large-scale changes

  • Use components to decouple parts of application

• You benefit by having deployable code for functional testing throughout the sprint

Abstraction Layers

• Improves your architecture, avoids brittle implementations

• May require refactoring of existing code

  • then you can more easily implement constantly improving technology

• Create new implementation

  • Update abstraction layer to delegate to new implementation

  • Remove old implementation

• Do you use Interface-driven Programming?

  • Objects should depend on interfaces not concrete types

    • Don’t write your class to use AzureStoragePersonRepository

    • Write the class to code against IPersonRepository

Dependencies

• Build-time and run-time

• Components – you control the code

  • May be frequently updated

  • Need to avoid “Dependency Hell”

  • Dividing your codebase into Components

    • Not necessarily the same as N-Tier

    • Pipelining components

• Libraries – you don’t control the code

  • Usually less frequently updated

Architectural benefits

• Loosely coupled, well-encapsulated, collaborating components is good design

• More efficient collaboration and feedback when working on large systems

• Avoids the use of complex branching strategies

• Minimizes serious problems in integrating large applications

Continuous Integration

• Why is this important?

  • Your code always builds

  • Automated tests validate quality

  • You can deploy working software

• Everybody checks in to Mainline at least once a day

• If you are not merging into Mainline at least every day you are not doing continuous integration

Keeping your branching structure clean and simple sounds easy but involves work and attention to detail. Detail in right sizing PBI’s and SBI’s, and detail in frequent check-in and merging. Combined with some architectural best practices you’ll benefit with continuously integrated, high quality potentially shippable code.

INETA is turning 10 this year, on February 12 to be specific. This is a great time to reflect on how INETA and our .NET Community have grown. In addition to founding and running several user groups in Orange County, California I had the honor of serving INETA for several years, first as Membership Mentor for California, then as Treasurer and finally as Vice President.

Here’s a little history:

INETA is a worldwide support organization for user groups. INETA North America’s main objective is to provide a body of resources and support for starting and successfully running user groups focused on Microsoft’s .NET technologies.

INETA was founded February 12, 2002. The original board members were Bill Evjen, Brian Loesgen, Keith Franklin and Keith Pleas. Initially there were about 40 user groups, however within the next four years INETA grew to about 500 groups with 170,000 members. Today, INETA has more than 1,500 user groups representing more than 1,500,000 developers worldwide.

INETA has five worldwide regions (Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America, Middle East-Africa, and North America), each with its own board of directors. INETA was created by volunteers and continues to be run almost exclusively by volunteers. Each region is responsible for the planning and implementation of its programs and services. The regional leads also talk and meet regularly to coordinate high level issues across all regions.

The first word in INETA is International but initially INETA’s focus was on the United States and Canada. However, in our second year we expanded to Europe with the assistance of Christian Nagel, then to Asia Pacific with Mitch Denny taking the lead and Jose Berrios in Latin America. At present Joe Guadagno is President of INETA NorAm, Jose Berrios continues as President INETA LatAm, Damir Tomic is President INETA Europe, Sanjay Shetty is President INETA Asia Pacific and Daron Yöndem is President INETA Middle East and Africa. For each region, the mission is the same – a worldwide support organization for user groups. Each region focuses on the unique needs of its user groups.

INETA is committed to providing valuable resources to user group leaders around the world. The focus is on providing support for all user group related needs, while providing valuable third party resources for technical information needs. With so many .NET experts involved in INETA, members get a front row seat to the .NET revolution as it continues to unfold. The INETA community model further provides members with an opportunity to be a contributing member of this revolution.

INETA North America resources available to member user group leaders include:

• Community Speaker Program
• INETA Live
• Support for community activities such as code camps
• INETA Community and User Group Leader Offers
• INETA Newsletters
• Swag
• Support and suggestions on how to set up and successfully run a user group
• Networking
• Sponsorship (this stuff doesn’t come for free)

Typical member groups in INETA Noram come in all sizes. From groups with thousands of members and meeting with attendance in the hundreds to groups with a handful of members per meeting, INETA provides support without differentiation. Members of typical user groups come from all kinds of backgrounds including independent consultants and corporate developers, people with lots of experience with .NET and those just getting into it.

INETA programs and activities are focused on building and sustaining user group participation and membership. They include a TechEd presence, support for local user group membership growth activities, newsletters, promotion of industry events, and partnering with the Developer Evangelists from the local Microsoft office.

INETA continues to build a strong community around .NET. This can be seen in the continued growth in membership and user groups, as well as success of events that bring people together such as Code Camps. Through a continued close relationship with Microsoft user group members to have access to product teams, special discounts and offers, and early education about upcoming products. 

If you are planning to attend Visual Studio Connections and want to download my Scrum presentation material in advance, here are the links. Hope to see you in Las Vegas.

Scrum Fundamentals – Do It Right
Top 10 Dysfunctions With Scrum – Don’t Shoot the Messenger!
Scrum Product Owner – Big Responsibilities
Herding Pigs – Managing Self-Organizing Teams

This weekend at SoCal Code Camp Los Angeles was my final warm-up for Visual Studio Connections. A big thanks for all who attended and especially to those who offered constructive feedback.  Overall the LA Code Camp was a big success.

SoCal Code Camp Los Angeles is coming soon at the USC campus. As of today there are 61 sessions; I expect over 100 by the time I have to do scheduling. This year we should have more large audience rooms available.

I’m doing four sessions with a big focus on Scrum as a final warm-up for my Scrum/Agile track at DevConnections:

Scrum Fundamentals – Do It Right
Top 10 Dysfunctions With Scrum – Don’t Shoot the Messenger!
The Scrum Product Owner – Big Responsibilities
Herding Pigs – Managing Self-Organizing Teams

Please RSVP if you plan to attend. It really helps us with the event planning. Hope to see you there.