Tim Bauer’s Running Thoughts

Semi-daily webcast summaries/insights

MSFT VSTS and Macroscope

Well I guess you know you have arrived when MSDN will do a webcast on your extension to one of thier products. See below for details but basically they are going to do a review of the Macroscope Process template for VSTS on MSDN.

Definitely a consideration for a shop that is (1) MSFT and (2) looking for more methodology rigor around the VSTS toolset. Basically, Fujitsu has taken their Macroscope methodology and baked it into VSTS. Not bad.

Tim


From: Ajoy Krishnamoorthy [mailto:Ajoy.Krishnamoorthy@microsoft.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2006 9:00 AM
Cc: Masayuki Katayama; John Voorhies; Brooke Banbury
Subject: MSDN Webcast on Macroscope for VSTS - Announced at http://msdn.microsoft.com

The announcement for our upcoming (Sept 5th) MSDN web cast on “Macroscope for VSTS” is announced in MSDN. Please check the “Events and Web Casts” section at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/.

FYI

ajoy krishnamoorthy
Enterprise Strategy Consultant
Microsoft Consulting Services
Email: ajoyk@microsoft.com
Cell Phone: (614) 403-8164
Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ajoyk

September 5, 2006 Posted by bauertim | Uncategorized | , , , | No Comments

MSFT: VSTS - Measure Projects

Watched this webcast today

Using Metrics from Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server (TFS) to Manage and Troubleshoot Your Projects (Level 200)

given our current clients that are looking at TFS and/or asking us to help implement it. It was a nice run by of various reports and how MSFT sees them enabling the project management group. The keys I took away, however, were:

1. AVOID THE WORD AGILE? It is interesting to me that they specifically never said agile in this presentation … while the entire basis of thier demo was thier CMMI process (agile delivery approach). They referred to it as “Value Up”. I assume this is coming from thier PM SME group. Stop fighting the religious war over the word ‘Agile’. Take the concept and roll out the parts that make sense. Intriguing. Very intriguing. We are contemplating a similar move on the SCM front and Usability fronts.
2. SINGLE REPORTING VISION? It got me back on my horse that we need to have a singular reporting vision. Recent attempts at TFS rollouts by our teams are going with the angle of one project plan for the delivery team in TFS and allowing the PM group to have a seperate one. Watching this it is very clear with some deep thought the two can be integrated. Allow the dev team to work on infinite granualar tasks that ALL tie to a super set of project tasks (be it CMMI or another delivery method).

Here are my rough notes from the presentation:

Quote:
Tom Patton - Program Manager for Team Foundation Server
…………○ 0:30 - Typical measures: Qlty, functionality, resources, time
…………○ 1:30 - Two paridigms
……………………§ Work down (up front planning)
……………………§ Value up (iterative, agile)
……………………§ 2:00 comparison of the two (planning, chang mgmt, measure focus, qlty def, variance acceptance, work products, troubleshooting, approach to trust)
…………○ 5:30 - Performance impacted by metrics (chart. Focus becomes metrics not ture end goal … in this case … great software.
…………○ 7:00 - Friction Free Metrics in Team Foundation
……………………§ Unobtrusive collection
……………………§ Retain full history
……………………§ View metrics as they were in the past
……………………§ Changes as your process changes
…………○ 10:30 — DEMO - How metrics are selected in Team System
……………………§ 11:00 Team Explorer control (bugs, issues, task items, customer requirements, dev tasks, migration action status, etc)….see how tasks or work items relate to other items … as program mgr you can see requirements related
……………………§ (they are demo’ing from the CMMI templates)
……………………§ 16:00 — Talk to build functionality, bugs fixed, functionality impacted, test results against that build
…………○ 17:00 - Arch Overview
……………………§ Team Foundation DW System
………………………………□ Relational DW
………………………………□ OLAP Cube to render to players on project
………………………………□ Reports built on SQLServer and xls
………………………………□ Pulls from
…………………………………………¨ People, Dates, Projects
…………………………………………¨ Work Item Tracking
…………………………………………¨ Version control
…………………………………………¨ Team Build
…………………………………………¨ Team Test
…………………………………………¨ 3rd Party data sources
…………○ 19:00 - Value Up Questions
……………………§ Which requirements have been tested
……………………§ What is the quality
……………………§ Where do rsrcs do need to focus
……………………§ How far can we get in avail time
……………………§ How effective is our outsourced team
……………………§ How demonstrate practices for audit\
……………………§ How did the team perf trend?
…………○ 21:45 - Shipped Reports
……………………§ From team explorer, project portal, doc lib, report mgr
…………○ 22:30 - Demo 2 - Reports
……………………§ Team Explorer
………………………………□ Build report
………………………………□ Testing (regression test review)
……………………§ Portal
………………………………□ Various report views
………………………………□ CMMI reports.
…………………………………………¨ Iteration comparison page
…………………………………………¨ Remaining work (ie number of bugs)
……………………………………………………◊ Open, activations, closures
…………………………………………¨ Issue/Task Work Item reporting
……………………………………………………◊ Blocked tasks, versus issues … associate
…………………………………………¨ Friction free is just reporting on what goes on day to tday
…………………………………………¨ Project Velocity
…………………………………………¨ Reactivations. Defects carrying at any time … organge are reactivations (bugs reopened … poor testing)
………………………………□ 33:00 Front Page (Portal) Reports
…………………………………………¨ Quality Indicator Report (on builds)
……………………………………………………◊ Test / pass rate, code churn … degree of code change build to build (relative risk), purple line is code statistics.
…………………………………………¨ Customization might be to drill down drom one report
…………………………………………¨ Files modified by date, by person, by director, by type, by priority,
…………○ 41:15 - DEMO - Authoring Reports
……………………§ What can work in XLS
………………………………□ Ability to make reports on the data in xls
………………………………□ PIVOT table
………………………………□ Pull data from Team System DW
………………………………□ Slice by state. Activations.
……………………§ Report Designer
………………………………□ 47:00 - Deploy to reporting services
………………………………□ Show under reports node off team explorere
………………………………□ Its in Team System
…………○ 48:00 - Q&A
……………………§ Documentation?
………………………………□ Look in process guidance / template
………………………………□ Team portal. Description of reports from link there
……………………§ Include xls chart in reporting svcs report?
………………………………□ No. Adhoc is xls. Use reporting services
……………………§ Look at changed code in report?
………………………………□ Unknown. Change set is known. Diff tools could help it. It would be work.

May 6, 2006 Posted by bauertim | Uncategorized | , , | No Comments

MSFT: Visual Studio Team System Extensibility

I would give this webcast around extending Team System relative to system model a ‘3′ … not sure if its because I didn’t like the information and/or style of presentation … or if my ongoing feeling that this topic isn’t core to us colors my opinion. Probably more of the later since the concept of System Definition Models isn’t a hot topic with most of our middle market clients (any counter thoughts on that opinion?). In my early read, this aspect of Team System (System Models and customizing them) is about large production environments that need complex configuration and deployment management. Still it is part of the Team System story so I was curious to get a bit more detail ….

That said, if you are curious as well you can view the webcast here WEBCAST

Some of the notes I took as I tinkered as listened … are as follows.

Quote:
MSDN: Visual Studio Team System Extensibility: Creating & Extending System Definition Modules
–Dmitriy Nikonov, Program Mgr
–Erbil Yilmaz, Erbil Yilmaz

…………○ 1:50 - Goals
……………………§ Review SDM SDK (part of vs 2005 sdk)
……………………§ Steps to extend VSTESA
…………○ 2:30 - System Definition Model
……………………§ Formal model of a system
□ Application
□ Hosts
□ Network
□ Hardward
…………○ 4:00 Key Persona’s In System Definition Model
……………………§ Application Designer - config settings
……………………§ System Designer - config for deploy
……………………§ Deployment Designer - binds to data center comm err
……………………§ Logical Data Center Desiger -
…………○ 7:15 Using SDM SDK to extend VSTESA
……………………§ Add custom settings to delivered models (ie security, app health, etc)
……………………§ Add new application & logical server models
……………………§ Write new validators (security, threat models, sla models, app health, etc)
…………○ 11:30 - Talk about steps to extend
……………………§ Edit in notepad (XML)
…………○ 13:00 - What you get w/ the product (pieces)
……………………§ “System” Abstract Definitions
……………………§ “System” Prototypes
……………………§ Constraint Managers
…………○ 15:30 - How to create new models - Files
……………………§ Source SDM file (.sdm)
……………………§ Compiled SDM file (.sdmDocument)
……………………§ Manager Assembly (.dll)
……………………§ Prototype (.adPrototype or .lddPrototype)
……………………§ Bitmaps (optional)
……………………§ Setup (optional)
…………○ 16:30 - cmd lines tools
…………○ 17:30 - demo
……………………§ VS Design Surface
……………………§ 20:30 - Example of SDM XML file
……………………§ 29:00 - end demo
…………○ 29:30 - Creating Custom Validators
……………………§ Five steps (define, gen c# class, implement, compile, install)
……………………§ 32:00 - Complex traversal path to do this
…………○ 34:00 - Demo
……………………§ Discuss error msging back out of validators
…………○ 42:00 - End of Demo
…………○ 43:00 to 52:00 - Q&A

April 26, 2006 Posted by bauertim | Uncategorized | , | No Comments

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