How to be a Good TFS Master

I recently gave a talk at the Qld ALM User Group on the topic of “How to be a good TFS Master”.

Hopefully those who turned up got some great tips on how to use TFS more fully, but the main points I hoped people left with were:

Most people only use about 20-30% of the capabilities of TFS

In our experience, the majority of companies using TFS are using it for source control only.  SSW helps teams get closer to using 80 or 90% of TFS where the real advantages can be felt. There are some fairly significant infrastructure costs associated with getting to 100%, and we find most organisations don’t want to go that far.

TFS is much more than source control

In fact, if you’re using TFS purely for source control, you’re doing it wrong! You might even be better off using Git or Mercurial.  The best option (of course) is to start using TFS more fully to help you get the best out of your team.

TFS supports your Scrum process beautifully

TFS has some awesome capabilities that allow you to manage and support your entire scrum process. The integration story is compelling; allowing you to tie code changes directly to user stories, produce genuinely useful reports for your managers, and enforce your policies and coding standards allowing you to tick items off your Definition of Done without any effort.

For more information or some reminders of what I spoke about, have a look at the slides on Slideshare - http://www.slideshare.net/damovisa/how-to-be-a-good-tfs-master

Day 2 begins

Adam exercises his negotiation skills and saves us 25 cents

Day 2 started a lot smoother than Day 1 because we now knew the way to the venue.

Bonus 1: Today, we made it to the training venue in only 3 minutes vs. 1.5 hours yesterday. Talk about continuous improvement!

Today’s agenda saw a lot more interaction with the lovely Team Foundation Server (TFS).  It was time to see Scrum in action with the Microsoft tools.

Impediment 1: We were expecting a room full of cables to a switch, but unfortunately the training venue only had wireless.  There was no way for students to connect!  Matthew Hodgkins spent some time setting up laptop for us to bring along to the course.  It was set up with domain server and a TFS Virtual Machine ready for all the students to connect to.  With a lot of help from Matthew and Parmod Kumar (one of the Sysadmins working with the students), we got the server reconfigured so everyone could connect.

Parmod Kumar and I setting up TFS over wireless

Work Items in TFS

Adam Cogan started the day by cracking open TFS and walking through the work item world:

• Creating a Team Project
• Team Collections
• Areas and Iterations
• Managing Sprint Work Items
• Creating some Product Backlog Items
• Creating and Linking a Task
• Creating and Linking a Test Case
• Creating and Linking a Bug
• Managing Impediments
• Adding Check-in Policies

Adam C professed his love for Story Overview reports and also Priyanka Chopra – in his opinion the most beautiful girl in India.  He also spoke about his “tough” guts and what a “handbreak” Adam S and I were for not eating street food with him.

He let the teams have a quick break while he introduced them an awesome tool called Debugger Canvas.

Then it was on to TFS integration with Microsoft Excel and Project 2010, TeamCompanion, and UrbanTurtle.

Adam C introduced the first sprint of the day by telling everyone that there was a new Product Owner. He talked about all the things this new PO might want, so they would be well prepared when he arrived.

A new Product Owner arrives

The new Product Owner (this PO was a bit of a sweetie)

This new Product Owner was a bit odd.  He talked about his new wife, the new Tailspin website he purchased, and the Chinese developers he had sacked.  He told them about the bugs some people had told him about, and asked them to:

• Connect to TFS
• Log in to the SQL database
• Create a Team Project
• Add the 2 check-in policies he had heard about at a Microsoft seminar (being the “comments one in the Powertools”, and the “work items one that comes out of the box”)
• Check that the code from the Chinese developers compiles
• Tell him where he stands, and whether those Chinese guys were truthful when they told him it was “99% done”

The girls (Shilpa and Pomey) instructing the boys

The students had been given so much new information that morning, we were interested to know what they actually “heard”.

Review

All of the teams did OK considering this was their very first technical presentation.  We all know the human brain starts working when you’re born, and doesn’t stop until you stand up to speak in public.

Interestingly, they were very keen to show the Product Owner *all* of the work items they had created.  They had a very different idea of what they had to do.

There were a few impediments this time, however.  The teams found that they needed to install TFS Powertools in order to add the Check-in Policies.  Due to frequent power outages (apparently rampant in summer), this seemed to cause a lot of problems.  “Team Masters” had even added an impediment to TFS saying that TFS was down and was blocking them!  The Product Owner looked at them very incredulously.

“Team Scrumsters” actually fired up the new application and showed it working.  They were the only team that got the Product Owner jumping up and down with excitement.

The new Product Owner getting excited when he saw his new app Tailspin running

Before the Product Owner left, he played a video to introduce the students to some of his “American culture”. He played a Charlie Sheen video and talked about the importance of “winning”.

Retrospective

The big lesson that came out of the acceptance criteria was that the teams didn’t clearly understand what the Product Owner wanted.  Every team had a very different idea of what was required:

What Team A heard:

• Create a Team Project
• Create a SQL Server
• Create a Product Backlog
• Create some Test Cases
• Q: How many PCs do you need to get the code working on?
  A: 3 PCs
• They forgot their backlog and their burndowns (they worked from their standups)

What Team B heard:

• Create a Workspace in TFS
• Create a Check-in Policy
• See if we can increment items in the shopping cart
• Q: How many PCs do you need to get the code working on?
  A: 2 PCs
• They forgot their standups, backlog and burndowns

What Team C heard:

• Get Latest, and Build
• Fix the code for multiple items
• Make a Burndown chart
• Q: How many PCs do you need to get the code working on?
  A: 4 PCs
• They forgot their standups, backlog and burndowns

What Team B heard:

• 7 clear items were heard from the PO
• Get TFS going
• Get the TFS Power Tools installed
• Create the Tasks
• Create the Test Cases
• Q: How many PCs do you need to get the code working on?
  A: 1 PC
• They forgot their standups and their burndowns (they worked from their backlog)

Lunch

Once again, lunch was delicious.  Adam Stephensen asked heaps of questions about the selection of traditional Indian foods, the answers being fascinating.  He’s on track to come home with some new recipes!

Selection of traditional Indian dishes for lunch

After lunch, Adam C treated the group to some Australian culture in the form of an ad for Fosters.  He followed this up with a (remarkably similar) Canadian Molson video and was disappointed when the group preferred the Canadian version!

Example meetings

During lunch, Pradeep requested they see how the Aussies do their planning and standup meetings.

Adam C asked Adam S and I to stand up in front of the class and start work on a new sprint.

• We started with the creation of a backlog, estimated tasks (using the “Fist method”), and created a burndown
• We started and finished day one, and just as we finished,
• Adam got us to do a day 2 standup, complete with a burndown update

Adam S and I estimating tasks in our Planning meeting

Bonus 2: This ended up being quite worthwhile.  Some of the students said it was the highlight as they got to see how it was “meant” to be done.

Adam C played the students a Karate Kid video to highlight the point that following the Scrum process is like developing muscle memory. If you follow the process, it starts to become second nature and you reap the benefits.

Sprint 2

Sprint 2 saw the teams get deeper into the solution.  They were asked to enter some more Product Backlog Items and make sure each person raised a bug.

One of the teams estimating tasks using the "Fist method" estimation method

Bonus 3: This sprint, every one of the teams did a standup and one team implemented the “fist” estimation technique.

The Review and Retrospective meetings were are lot more impressive this time.  All teams did a great job with their presentation and the Scrum process was finally in action in all its glory.

To close off the day, Adam C played a video showing how Emperor penguins work as a team for survival in Antarctica.  He emphasised the importance on the team in the Scrum framework.  If everyone is prepared to give their bit for the team, it will benefit everyone.

Retrospective Day 2

There was a lot of great feedback from the students on how the day went.  Some of the many highlights the group mentioned were:

• Learning to focus on what the Product Owner wants, not the process
• Seeing the tool (TFS) was much different to just knowing the theory
• The demo of the “Aussie” planning and standup meetings
• The Karate Kid story – the group now knows this is something to follow day in and day out
• Learning what Scrum terms map to what TFS work items
• The Excel and TeamCompanion demos
• Working as a team
• Doing the exercises
• Learning about Check-in Policies
• Moving from theory to practical implementation
• The story of the Antarctic penguins and the importance of working in a good team

Tomorrow will see us delve deeper into Scrum using TFS and we’ll look at using Microsoft Test Manager to help run tests and raise very rich and repeatable bugs.

Taking a job at SSW as a Senior Software Architect is an exciting move for me. I’m expecting Adam Cogan and the rest of the team at SSW to coach me to be a better developer, trainer, team leader and Scrum Master.

I will work for a wide range of customers and I’m sure I’ll face many challenges, which I look forward to solving using ALM and a good Scrum strategy to find the best solution.

What does this mean?

This new job will bring a few new things:

1. I’ll be running the Brisbane office for SSW. This means meeting new customers, leading teams, and getting some SSW branding out there (probably by implementing some Rules to Better Branding)
2. Rules and standards. These are part and parcel of working for SSW.  It’s something they’re known for as a company and I will play a part in many of the new rules.
   Some of my favourites at the moment are:
   • Rules to Better Email
   • Rules to Happy Clients
   • Rules to Successful Projects

   And there are some I like but I can see myself contributing to in the near future:

   • Rules to Better Unit Tests
   • Rules to Better Interfaces – Mobile
3. Scrum and ALM. This will be a very big part of my work.  I’m looking forward to continuing to learn and implement effective Scrum at SSW and for a lot of clients. I’ve long had an appreciation for effective Scrum but, even in my first month, I can see even more that it is imperative to being able to deliver good software. In the next 6 months I will become both a Certified Scrum Master and a Professional Scrum Developer Trainer.
   In particular, I’ll be focusing on
   • Scrum
   • Automated Functional Testing
   • TDD (where appropriate)
   • BDD
   • Continuous Integration
   • Continuous Deployment

   These are all pieces of the same puzzle and with the right combination, you can ship solid code quickly that really meets the customers’ needs.

4. Cutting-edge technology. Keeping up with cutting-edge technology is something SSW really values. They have two Microsoft Regional Directors and three MVP’s so it’s hard to argue with their expertise.
   I’m looking forward to working a lot more with the following technologies:
   • Visual Studio 2010
   • Dynamics CRM 2011
   • SharePoint 2010
   • ASP.NET MVC
   • Orchard CMS
   • Team Foundation Build 2010
   • Microsoft Test Manager and Telerik Test Suite
   • All things Microsoft .NET 4

   But there are some technologies I’m happy to leave to the other guys at SSW:

   • Silverlight 5
   • DotNetNuke

   I’m planning to delve deep in a lot of technologies to work out which are the best to use.  It’s important to have a wide skillset with expertise in a few key technologies.

5. Working with Telerik. SSW has a good relationship with Telerik and while I do use other 3^rd-party tools, Telerik is by far the most common at SSW.
6. Effective Communication. One of the first things I noticed with SSW was their attention to effective communication. If I took nothing else from SSW it would be the Rules to better Email which, if followed sensibly, helps me function really well as a member of a team.  Email can be a very effective tool and the last thing you want is a “What did you mean by that?” reply.
7. My blog. I expect my blog to get a lot better with posts about the things I’m working on.  In the foreseeable future I anticipate posts about:
   • Setting up an effective remote work environment
   • Upgrading customers from VB6 to .NET
   • Upgrading customers to TFS 2010
   • Migrating customers from onevTFS Process template to another using the TFS Integration Platform
   • Upgrading SharePoint from 2007 to 2010
   • Upcoming Public and Private Professional Scrum Developer courses
8. Training (on both sides of the podium). I’m looking forward to both learning at courses and running courses for others.

What’s next?

First things first. If you are in QLD and you are looking for a MVC/SharePoint/CRM/TFS/ALM consultant/team, give me a call!
Having an office in Brisbane means that SSW is much better equipped to provide these expert services.

Keep an eye out for me at the Brisbane user groups, conferences, and any tech event.  I’ll be even more active than before in the Australian tech community.  I look forward to having chats with other Brisbane-based techies.  And if you’re sick of the technology talk, feel free to branch out.  As a long-suffering St Kilda fan, I’m always happy to talk about all things AFL.

I’m excited about this next chapter in my professional life, and I’ll be sure to keep this blog up to day with all the challenges it brings.

With that in mind, I've created a "Hottest 100 Voting Helper" bookmarklet you can use to find Youtube videos of each of the songs.

A few other things you need to know to use it properly:

• It only works in the "separate window" version of the voting page. Look for the link in the instructions at the top.
• I've tested this in a few browsers, but I can't 100% guarantee its success in all of them.
• I also can't guarantee its effectiveness for any song - e.g. "[Me] - Naked" definitely doesn't come up with anything useful!
• If you put a song onto your shortlist, you'll have to click the bookmarklet again when the page finishes reloading. Sorry, it's just how these things work.

Enjoy. Any problems, shoot me a tweet or an email and I'll look into it.

First, some context.

Like many IT companies, we have a moratorium that runs over Christmas.  That means no changes to any production systems over the break.  It’s a sensible step given the large number of people on holiday.  The communication (at least internally) was that the moratorium began at “midnight on the 9th of December”. Here’s where the problem starts.

Different Interpretations

It turned out that there were two different ideas about what “midnight on the 9th” meant.  The different interpretations, for the most part, were split between technical staff and less technical staff.  The technical staff – programmers and sysadmins – tended to interpret “midnight on the 9th” as 12am on the morning of the 9th of December.  The less technical staff – managers and level 1 support – tended to interpret “midnight on the 9th” as midnight at the end of the 9th of December.

If you’re still reading, I’m sure you’re very strongly on one side of the fence and can’t understand how anyone could have a different interpretation.  That was what happened to us.  Some people got quite fired up about it.

It’s totally first thing in the morning, idiot!

The argument here is that midnight is written as 12:00am or, in 24 hour time, 00:00.  If it’s AM or zero, then surely it’s first thing in the morning.  How could it be anything else?!

No you moron, it’s in the middle of the night at the end of the day!

The alternative argument is that nobody would think “midnight tonight” was actually tomorrow, or that there is no “midnight tonight”.  It’s in the middle of the night, and the night belongs to the day before. Geez!

My original position

Originally, I was very much in camp first-thing-in-the-morning.  That’s probably because nobody in my experience has ever referred to midnight as 24:00.  Indeed, no programming language I’ve ever encountered has defined midnight as anything other than the first moment of time available for a day.  Having said that, I could appreciate that phrases like “midnight tonight” were fairly unambiguous even if they didn’t agree with my technical definition.

So I decided to read more.

Most dictionaries I referenced very unhelpfully referred to midnight as, “the middle of the night”, or “12 o’clock at night”.  That really didn’t help me prove that I was right and everyone who disagreed with me were wrong.

Everybody’s wrong!

It seemed that no organisation really wanted to decide which day midnight belonged to.  NIST even recommended avoiding using 12am or 12pm because it’s ambiguous.  They actually have a good explanation of why on that site.

And that seems to be the answer.  Midnight does not belong to either of the days it splits.  Midnight really acts as a separator.  It’s infinitely small, and it doesn’t actually exist in either day.  Technically, it’s not a time of the day at all, but the point at which the day changes.

It helps to compare it to “midday”.  Nobody vehemently claims that midday belongs to the morning or the afternoon.  It’s generally agreed that it’s the point between them.  Of course you don’t get the same problems with midday because “midday on the 9th” is unambiguous; there’s only one time it can be.

Ok, so not everybody is wrong

Ultimately it comes down to convention, and the convention seems to be that midnight is at the end of a day.  It’s not technically correct, but more people understand it that way than the alternatives.

Of course that would mean that I was wrong.

It’s a stupid argument anyway.

When you do a date comparison with DateTime.Now using LINQ-to-Entities against a SQL Server database, the engine translates DateTime.Now to GetDate().

For example:

var items = (from t in context.Token
             where t.Expiry > DateTime.Now).ToList();

will ultimately generate SQL that says:

...
WHERE Token.Expiry > GetDate()
...

This can cause some significant (and subtle) problems:

If the application running this code is on a different server to the SQL database, any time differences can break code.

This is what happened to me.  There was a one minute time difference between the web service running this code and the SQL Server machine.  I was using the Entity Framework to set the expiry date to DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(60), and retrieving it later by comparing it to DateTime.Now.  Despite this, I was effectively setting the expiry using the web server’s time, and comparing it using the SQL Server’s time.

If you’re having a similar problem, I hope you stumble across this post.

I’m using an ASP.Net CMS called Kentico CMS.  It is quite good – much more friendly than some others I’ve used recently.  I’ve been trying to get the CSS Menu control set up so that it will always show root pages, and also the pages beneath the current page.  It wasn’t as easy as I thought.

For example:

Home
About
 - Our Products
 - Our Services
    - Programming
    - Design
Links
 - Friends
Contact

In the example above, no matter where I was on the site, I wanted to see Home, About, Links, and Contact on the menu.  If I was on the About page, then the Our Products and Our Services links should be shown as well.  So I’m looking for the root pages and the children of the current page.  I thought this was pretty standard menu behaviour, but it took me a couple of hours to figure out.

Here’s the solution:

In the design view, edit the properties of the menu by clicking on its gears icon, go to the Content Filter section and put the following query in the WHERE condition field:

NodeAliasPath LIKE ‘{&/{0}/%&}’ OR NOT NodeAliasPath LIKE ‘/%/%’

This gets all items under the current one {0}, or anything that’s not a root element.  You’ll have to make sure the Maximum nesting level is set appropriately, but that’s it.

Hopefully someone else with the same problem will stumble across this and save themselves an hour or two.

Now here’s the point in this post where I really wish I could remember the word I want to use.  You know when you hear about something for the first time in your life, then amazingly you hear about it several times in the next short while?  You wonder how you’re suddenly being bombarded with this new concept when you only just found out about it?  Yeah, there’s a word for that and I’ve forgotten what it is.  That word goes here.

I picked up a Popular Science magazine a few days before I found this Slashdot post and amazingly, there was a whole section in it about “free” energy.  Awesome concept.

There’s a whole host of low-powered devices in common use today, and there’s superfluous energy being expended everywhere.  Surely this energy can be used to power these low-powered devices?

The simplest example in the Popsci magazine was the humble light switch.  When you wire up a house, you have wire for power going to the actual light, as well as wire for control going from the light to the light switch.  When you flick the switch to turn the light on, you’re expending energy.  Not much, granted, put apparently enough to send a wireless signal to the light (or a controller next to it) to tell it to turn on.  With a setup like this, there’s no need for wire to run down the walls to the switches.  Yeah, it’s not much of a power saving and it’s probably not worth the extra initial cost right now, but in the future it could, and combining a few dozen simple ideas like this in every house could surely save some energy.

The fact is, we expend a lot of energy when we do anything.  There’s also ambient energy all over the place – the obvious ones like wind and light, but also vibrations and body heat.  If we could capture a fraction of that energy and put it to use, we’d have much less need for power plants.

There are thousands of options out there.  If you go for a walk, chuck your mobile phone in the little holster on your belt, and as you walk, the up-down motion of your steps can charge it.  Or maybe the energy absorbed when rain lands on your car roof could be enough to power your windscreen wipers.

Perhaps after a time, when it becomes cheap enough, device manufacturers may get into the habit of building these “free” power sources into their devices.  A mobile you didn’t have to plug into a wall or a sound-powered LED light you could just stick onto a ceiling would certainly have a market.

Clearly this stuff interests me.

I’m moving on from my current job.

I won’t delve too deeply into the reasons, but the short version is that I’ve really done all I can for my career at Global MoneyLine at the moment.  I assume it’s the same with most financial institutions, but times are tough and the emphasis is understandably not on exciting new projects and new technologies.  Consequently, I’m not really learning new things and expanding myself any more and for me, that means its time to go.  It will turn around, sure, but I guess I’m just impatient.

So I start my new job with The Systems Works (www.tsw.com.au) on Monday next week.  Excited, anxious, slightly nervous, but very much looking forward to the change.  I’ll keep you posted.

Basically, the premise is that there’s a very common misconception that all programmers are alike and have the same productivity.  It’s definitely worth a read.

While his article focuses on the practice of offshoring programming to cheap overseas countries, the idea is also relevant when talking about hiring new (local) programmers either to replace others or in response to increased workload.

The misconception that all programmers are the same can lead to an almost apathetic approach to hiring by managers.  If someone quits, that’s fine, we’ll just hire another programmer to take over the work.  If there are new requirements that mean we need a new developer, then fine, we’ll just hire another one.  One problem is that there’s usually a significant lead time filled with learning about the project before even the best programmer can be truly productive.  The other problem is that which is outlined in Miano’s article; one programmer can be many times more effective than another.

I’m not sure what the solution to this is.  I’ve preached this line many a time but because it’s in such stark contrast to the person x time = fixed productivity formula that is relatively true for most other professions, it falls on deaf ears.