Tag: alm

  • TFS as perfect tool for Scrum (Part 1) – Introduction in Scrum and TFS

    Originally posted on The Road to ALM: This year I was invited again to present at Microsoft TechDays. This event is held every year in the World Forum in The Hague. This year I spoke about why TFS is the perfect tool for Scrum. My session was about how to…

  • 4 reasons why agile teams should stage deployments each iteration

    4 reasons why agile teams should stage deployments each iteration

    There are a few shops like Etsy that use continuous deployment/delivery to have code go straight into production, but otherwise the rest of us have some sort of environment between the developer’s machine and the live production environment.  Some call this Staging or QA, or there may actually be MANY…

  • Free Agile Task Tracking with Trello

    There are a ridiculous number of tools out there to help track tasks, but of all of them, Trello has been my favourite for cheap agile task tracking.  It’s has no cost, unlimited boards, real-time collaboration, and a UI so intuitive it makes adoption across the team dead simple. First…

  • Profiling Integration Performance on a Tight Budget

    Application performance is heavily dependent on the performance of the communications between the primary application and all other integrated systems.  Even the tiniest of changes in a connected system can suddenly cause a huge performance hit.  For example, a small web service retrieving data about a user when they log…

  • Dungeons and Dragons TFS Process Template

    There was no way that I could resist downloading the D&D process template posted by the TFS product team on their blog.  I absolutely NEEDED to see what had been done inside here.  The blog post was very bare on the details, but it seems that with a few configuration changes…

  • TDS: So you’re deploying Sitecore to a new environment…

    TDS: So you’re deploying Sitecore to a new environment…

    If you’ve been using TDS to do automated deployments for Sitecore, you’ll eventually need to start deploying to a new environment.  Maybe you’ve set up your local environment, and now you want to get that process working in a daily build environment.  Maybe you want to automate deployment to a…

  • ALM Summit Videos now posted

    For those of you that have been following my series on the ALM sessions at the end of January in Redmond, Microsoft has posted the videos from the summit over on Channel9. I’ve updated my own posts to include video links, so if you prefer to read through the posts…

  • Integration Testing with Unit Tests and MSTest

    In many of the projects that I have worked on, the application we’re building needs to integrate with a back-end system or a web service layer that is maintained by a third party or by another team.  In these cases, we shouldn’t assume we’ll have the ability to ensure that…

  • ALM Summit: Day Three

    The conference is all done, and I’m finally home from Seattle wishing there was more, but also really wanting to get back into the office and share what I’ve learned. I met some incredible people this week, and had some great conversations around the breakfast table, over beers, and in…

  • ALM Summit: Day Two

    Wow, day two is in the books… where to start?  Well, maybe I’ll start at the end:  Free beer and buffet for over 3 hours definitely provided a nice finish to the end of the day.  I didn’t network the way I imagine I was probably supposed to: milling around the room…

  • ALM Summit: Day One

    I’ve never been to a conference like this before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.  The conference kicked off Tuesday at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, which is a beautiful building, even if I’ve only seen the conference rooms on the bottom floor so far 🙂  The start-time for registration…

  • Managing the Agile Process

    Aaron Bjork made a great presentation at ALM Summit 2011.  I’ll be providing my insights into using TFS 2012 on projects in some upcoming posts, but I think Aaron did an awesome job of explaining some of the agile management issues, as well as showcasing some of the new features…

  • Hinshelwood’s “new normal”

    Not my own words, but I think that Martin Hinshelwood’s posting on the new normal of the modern application lifecycle is a very important read for anybody interested in getting ALM and agile processes working in today’s industry.