This year, the 8th edition of the XP Days Benelux takes place on November 25-26th 2010.  The location is Kapellerput in Heeze (The Netherlands).

Together with my colleague Peter Doomen, I'm selected as a speaker.  The session we are going to deliver is the Frog Factory. Read more about this session here and here.

All the info about the XpDays can be found here.

May we have your vote please? Together with 3 colleagues, I participate on the PMI Agile contest on YouTube. Have a look at our presentation Agile @ SD Worx YannicHelsen and give us your vote! How to? Sign in on YouTube, become a member of the PMIAgile group on http://lnkd.in/BpXYNP  , click on our video (“Agile @ SDWorx” YannicHelsen) and vote for use by clicking I love it! Tnx in advance!

This is the video:

Mattias Skarin aka Crisp posted a nice small article with a case study about a team that is transformed from Scrum to Kanban.  He also put a few things he learned from this process, but also mentioned that they still have a way to go.

So if you are interested in this, read it here: http://blog.crisp.se/mattiasskarin/2010/04/27/1272362964756.html

You always want to know what the ScrumMaster is doing in your team/company?  Well now it's the time you will find out.  Scrum Alliance has posted a nice article with the task of a SM.  Little remark, this list varies per company. So read it here: http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/160-what-does-a-scrummaster-do.

You want to use Kanban or you are already using it.  But you also have used Scrum or know Scrum.  Both are the buzz words at this moment in the Agile world.  But still you don't know which one is the best in common or the best for you?  Are they related to each other? Could you easily adapt both together?  Is it easy to make a switch form one to the other?

Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin from InfoQ have writen a book to clear this fog for you.  the book includes following chapters:

• Kanban and Scrum in a nutshell
• Comparison of Kanban and Scrum and other Agile methods
• Practical examples and pitfalls
• Cartoons and diagrams illustrating day-to-day work
• Detailed case study of a Kanban implementation within a Scrum organization

You can download it for free or buy the paper book.  Read everything here: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/kanban-scrum-minibook.

When you use Scrum, most people think it's not compatible with Process Improvement Models like CMMI.  At my work CMMI is used by the testers for structured testing. So we have a Lova and Hate situation.

Well, the following article proves that we are wrong and the there's a Love and Marriage situation: http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2010/01/1001Glazer.html

(Thanks to my colleague Tom Vercauteren for the link)

I must say, a difficult question, as both methodologies have a different audience and way of use.  Although Kanban is of the same family as Scrum.  in fact, in my opninion it's a light weight Scrum with a more dynamic area.  I'm going to setup Kanban for our team here after my holiday (somewhere around mid november).

But about our question, Doug Shimp has wrote a nice blog article about it.  You can read it here: http://doug-shimp.net/scrum-faq/will-kanban-replace-scrum/

You don't know anything about Scrum, but want to know more about it, well here's some help.

Mike Cohn has made a nice presentaiton "Introduce Scrum to your team, ScrumMaster and Product Owner".  The nice thing is that this presentation is already availlable in 14 languages.

Read more here: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum-a-presentation

Roy Osherove has blogged an interesting article on his Team Leadership blog Five Whys.  In this article he talks about how many time a team lead should be with his team to be an effective teamlead for his team.

So if you're a teamlead reaad this article : http://5whys.com/blog/spend-at-least-50-of-your-time-with-your-team.html

For the moment we use Conchango's Scrum template v2.1.  We have some older TFS Team Projects created with an older version of the template, which isn't availlable anymore on the server.  Now we want to know in what version these team projects are created. 

You can get the info with a certain report, namely the version report.

This report will give you the report version and depending on the version info about the process time.  As you can see in the next picture.

The report version is the same as the Template version.

After two years, the Microsoft Scrum template for TFS is maintained.  You can read all info on Brian Harry's blog : http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/06/10/the-future-of-escrum.aspx

If your are looking for the Scrum template of Conchango, well read their announcement about the template : http://blogs.conchango.com/stuartpreston/archive/2009/05/19/scrum-for-team-system-v3-0-plans.aspx

Together with my colleague Bart Wullems I wrote an article about eScrum in Team Foundation Server.  This article is published in the Dutch .Net Magazine.  This magazine is from Microsoft Netherlands for the Netherlands and Belgium Microsoft Developers.

This is the link directly to our article : http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/3/0/130ccf47-be89-48ee-829d-3a6568befbaa/114602.pdf (It's in Dutch)

You can read the magazine online here : http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-nl/cc998678.aspx.

As I'm a big fan of using Scrum in your project, I came aware about the Softhouse site.  They have some interesting material about Scrum to download.

But the most interesting part is the PDF that explains Scrum in five minutes.  You can use this info to give people, who don't Scrum, a high level overview about this Agile method.

This is the last part of the series posts about scrum under TFS.  We'll end this story by taking a look into the future by having a sneak preview at the Scrum templates for Visual Studio 2008.  Read our previous parts here:

• Part one: Introduction
• Part two: The installation
• Part three: User experiences
• Part four: Feature overview
• Part five: Conclusions

This article is also cross posted on the Ordina blog.

What about Team System 2008 ?

We looked at each of these templates in 2 ways:

1. Does the template still works after an inplace upgrade to TFS 2008?
2. Is there a new (upgraded) version available specifically for TFS 2008?

Microsoft eScrum

After an inplace upgrade, the template was still up and running. Only the website suffered a painful dead. Brian Harry was so friendly to post a solution on his blog. Go check it out!

VSTS Scrum Process Template

Everything keeps working after the inplace upgrade. A newer version is available here.

Conchango Scrum for Team System

No problems occured after the inplace upgrade. Scrum for Team System v2.0 is now available. Don't hesitate and download this template here.

Conclusion

Microsoft did a good job in terms of backward compatibility. After using the upgraded versions of the templates for some time, I did not encounter any problems. If we look at the new releases, we'll find a range of improvements. But this will be a story for a future series of blog posts.

So stay tuned for an updated version of these posts where we'll dig deeper into the new features of the updated Scrum templates for Team System 2008.

Your TFS Scrummasters

Bart Wullems and Sven Cipido

The fifth part of the series posts about scrum under TFS.  This time we will give a final review and our conclusion about the Scrum templates under TFS2005.  Read our previous parts here:

• Part one: Introduction
• Part two: The installation
• Part three: User experiences
• Part four: Feature overview

This article is also cross posted on the ordina blog.

Final review

eScrum

Advantage:

• Much SCRUM functionality on board
• Easy to use
• Lot of reports specific Scrum
• Has web front end

Disadvantage:

• Scrum à la Microsoft
• First version contains lots of bugs
• Extra libraries needed if you want to use the site also.
• Difficult installation, it’s a pain in the ass
• No help in Visual Studio
• Sometimes slow.  But the test was under a VPC, but you still need a heavy server.

CodePlex

Advantage:

• Easy installation
• Guidance Explorer
• Very easy, very common as working with the standard TFS, just some renaming. 

Disadvantage:

• Not a many extra’s like reports
• No daily scrum
• In fact doesn’t follow the Scrum guidelines

Conchango

Advantage:

• Implements mostly the Scrum guidelines
• Easy in use, and very low learning curve
• Several skillfull tools added
• Very good reporting

Disadvantage:

• No web interface

Conclusion

If you want to use Scrum in TFS, Conchango is for the moment the best (free) solution.  The very good reporting with the skillfull tools makes it a pleasant experience.
eScrum has a lot of potential, but sometimes drops a stitch.  A very good point is the web interface.
Codeplex in its current form has too many limits to use in practice.  Although there is a final version (since September 2007) which seems to go on the good way.

So this was the fifth part.  In the next part, we'll talk about the Scrum templates under TFS2008. 

Your TFS Scrummasters

Bart Wullems and Sven Cipido

The fourth part of the series posts about scrum under TFS.  This time we will give a complete overview of all the features of the Scrum templates.  Read our previous parts here:

• Part one: Introduction
• Part two: The installation
• Part three: User experiences

This article is also cross posted on the ordina blog.

We'll start by explaning the different criteria we looked at:

• Licensing: What are the licensing conditions? Is it free to use?
• Installation: Which format has the provided setup? Are there any installation guidelines?
• Web Interface: Is there a separate web interface available?
• Real Scrum: Does the template follows all the Scrum principles?
• Process Guidance: Is there any form of process guidance available?
• Workitems: Which workitems are available?
• Custom reports: Which custom reports are available?
• Custom queries: Which custom queries are available?
• Overall quality: How did we rate the overall quality of the template? 
• Bugs found: Did we found any bugs while testing?

So this was the fourth part.  In the next part, we'll do a final review and make some conclusions. 

Your TFS Scrummasters

Bart Wullems and Sven Cipido

The third part of the series posts about scrum under TFS.  This time we will focus on the usage of the Scrum templates.  Read our previous parts here:

• Part one: Introduction
• Part two: The installation

This article is also cross posted on the Ordina blog.

Use the Scrum templates

Common

Create your Team Site with the correct Template.  Once you have chosen a template, you can’t change to another template only make minor changes to the chosen template.

eScrum

Learning eScrum from within TFS is very difficult as there is no guidance.  So there is a lot of searching what everything means. For example: product backlog details, area, sprint backlog details.

The best way to learn this product is by using the web interface.  Here you can find a context sensitive help for each part which explains you very well what it means.

You can group several product items by using the areas.  There can be several areas’ which can contain several products.

A sprint is the same as iteration in TFS and the product backlog details in Scrum is the description in TFS.
Sprint information (Scrum master, start and end date of the sprint, goal,…) can be filled in the Sprint details

When using TFS to add your sprint items you have to connect manually the backlog ID.  This is done automatically when using the web interface.

In common we can say that the web interface is more handy and user friendly to use than TFS.  Although that the web interface has a few issues.  There are times that items disappear in the web interface.  But when you restart they’re back.  Also it seems that the page refresh after a post back not always work.  And in some cases you need a full refresh trigger (F5) before everything will be showed again.

Also viewing some reports seems to give problems, but after you rebuild the data warehouse this is solved.
The biggest disadvantage of eScrum is that not all the Scrum guidelines are followed.  Microsoft shouldn’t be Microsoft if they haven’t give it their own interpretation.  For example the burn down chart doesn’t give an overview of the complete sprint, but only to the current date.  This doesn’t give you a complete overview of the sprint.  Also when you want to book more hours than initial planned on a sprint task, eScrum gives sometimes strange results.

CodePlex

Codeplex has the less connection with Scrum.  There is no product backlog only the sprint backlog.  Making sprint items is equal to making work items.  During this phase you also include the item to an iteration.  There are 3 reports and the rest are just the standard reports.

Most of the changes are just a rename of the standard VSTS items.

The name Lightweight is well chosen.

Conchango

Using this template gives us a very nice user experience because it’s totally converted to Scrum

When creating product backlog items or sprint items, you have to fill in the manually the sprint number, which is defined separately.

There is no direct connection between the product backlog items and the sprint items, but you can link them through the Links tab.  This is the best solution, because you can’t create a hierarchical structure in VSTS 2005.

They have integrated a recycle bin, so if you “delete” (which means status is set to deleted) a Work item, you can recover it from here.

There are a few administration modules available which gives us extra possibilities.

It’s easy to maintain the users through the separate Administration tool “Listmanager”.  Through the Administration module “Report installer” you can choose which reports are available per project.

If you want a direct update of for example the burn down charts, you can use the “Warehouse manager” to push a direct update.

So this was the third part.  In the next part, we will give a complete overview of all the Scrum templates. 

Your TFS Scrummasters

Bart Wullems and Sven Cipido

The last 2 days I followed a Scrum Master training to become a certified Scrum Master given by Joseph Pelrine.  As I'm already using scrum for almost 3 years now, it was nice to have some course around it.  I must say even after 3 years, you still learn new things.  I will just give some interresting points about this course, but the whole 2 days were interresting (and yes Joseph I don't want to give too much info, just make people warm for your course).

1. Joseph's rules about Scrum (and I totally agree with them)
   • We don't make mistakes, we learn
   • If you don't have fun, there's something wrong (I can say we had some great fun during this course)
2. Scrum is a system of 3's
   • 3 Roles
   • 3 types of Meetings
   • 3 types of documents
3. "Turn up the heat" of your team so they come out of their daily routine
4. Although in my previous blogpost about Scrum (written in 2005) I have talked that a good sprint length would be 30 days, but it's better to find a spint length where have a good feeling.  And don't talk ind ays or months but in weeks.
5. Also I wrote down that the meetings should be taken 4 hours max, I must say let's downsized it till 90 minutes with a max of 2 hours.  BTW Joseph will give you some more great tips.
6. Very interresting was the part about Multiple Teams/Multiple Projects
7. We got some great tips for doing the Daily Scrum Meeting
8. And last but not least : You can setup several rules for your team and for the Product Owner

I learned a lot of new features, and I hope I can follow som other courses from Joseph (Particuly I'm interrested in the "Coaching of self organising teams" as I see this as a follow up of the Scum course).

So if you are interrested in this and want to follow a course just contact Joseph, and he will tell you more.

BTW : The chickens and pigs are still alive in Scrum .

BTW 2 : I had great time of fun with Joseph and Maddalena the first evening in Leuven and the second evening before I drove them back to the airport.  Txs you two.

As I'm posting with my colleague Bart a serie of 6 posts about Scrum templates in TFS2005, we also will cover TFS2008.

But just too make you warm you can download the new beta of Scrum for Team System v2 from Conchango.

They had a lot of new improvements.  Read more here.

Remark: if you upgrade form beta 1, read this forum post how to do it. (You must login to read it).

In this next post, we focus on the installation of the 3 Team Foundation Scrum templates we're gonna test. If you want to know more about Scrum or TFS, read our first blogpost here. This article will also be crosspost on the Ordina Blog.

Installation of the templates

Microsoft eScrum

1. Download the necessary files
2. Before you start installing the MSI, make sure you have following programs installed:
   • ASP 2.0 Ajax Extensions 1.0
   • Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library 1.5 installed
3. Install the MSI.
4. After the installation Read The F***ing Manual, because from here you have to do a lot of configuration work like security, IIS, and so on...
   • Our experience :
     Bad luck first... our installation failed. After some searching, we found that removing the Sharepoint templates and reinstalling them back by hand solved the problem. After this step the installation succeeded.
   • Remark: Microsoft has taken care of the several complains and bugs during the installation of the first eScrum version. Meanwhile they have released a new version (still called version 1.0) with a much better installation experience.
5. Create a project in TFS based on the installed eScrum template.
6. After the creation of an eScrum project, you still need to add the project to a config file in the directory where the eScrum website is installed. If you don’t do this, the project will not be available in the website.
7. The pain is over. We're done!

VSTS Scrum Process Template

1. Download the process template here.
2. Unzip the downloaded file
3. Read the readme.txt file! You'll regret it when you skip this step
4. Next install the SharePoint template(more info in the readme.txt 
5. Upload the process template to the team foundation server (If you have no idea how to start uploading templates, here is the answer.
6. Done!

Conchango Scrum for Team System

1. Surf to the Conchango website and  register to start downloading the necessary files.
2. After the short registration process, download the MSI files.
3. Run the MSI's and follow the installation instructions. There is one MSI for the template and one for the administration utilities.
4. The project guidance can be viewed online, but can also downloaded separately and added to TFS. Allthough we used version 1 of this guidance, a second edition is available.
5. Don’t forgot to install the reports through the Administration module “Report installer”. At first we did not do that. The reports were visible in Team Explorer, but we've got an error when calling one. After reinstalling the reports throught the Report Installer, the problem was solved.
6. After the installation, you'll find following administration utilities at your service:
   • Migration Utility: Migrate your current TFS Scrum projects to the newer version
   • Report Installer: Choose which reports you want to install additionally in your project.
   • Warehouse Manager: One of the problems in TFS is that changes to workitems are not directly visible in reports. The reason for this is that the datawarehouse only runs one time each hour(by default) to collect all info. This could be a problem because a lot of developers wait till just before the Daily Scrum Meeting to update their information. During the meeting this information isn’t up to date and the burndown chart doesn’t match the current situation.With the warehouse manager it is possible to start the update directly or even to regenerate the warehouse from scratch.You can achieve the same functionality with the command line tools of TFS, but this manager gives you a much nicer experience.
     • Remark: Depending on the number of projects and the amount of date, rebuilding  the warehouse could be a time consuming task. Keep that in mind before you start clicking the rebuild button.
   • Teams & Enviroments: Manage the environments and teams in your TFS projects.

Conclusion about the installation process

As a conclusion we could say that installing the different templates wasn't a big problem. One precaution must be made. Always start by reading the available documentation, this will save you a lot of time(I know that IT guys normally don't read manuals, but please make an exception. You will be thankful).

So this was the second part.  In the next part, we will talk about our usage experiences with the different templates. 

Your TFS Scrummasters

Bart Wullems and Sven Cipido

In our company lately I'm busy with TFS and Scrum.  Also my colleague Bart is busy with these items.  So we decided to joined together for a serie of posts about the different Scrum templates in TFS. This article will also be crosspost on the Ordina blog. So let's start with the first post of this serie.

What is Scrum?

A definition by ControlChaos.com:

Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work. It produces a potentially shippable set of functionality at the end of every iteration. It's attributes are: 

• Scrum is an agile process to manage and control development work. 
• Scrum is a wrapper for existing engineering practices. 
• Scrum is a team-based approach to iteratively, incrementally develop systems and products when requirements are rapidly changing 
• Scrum is a process that controls the chaos of conflicting interests and needs. 
• Scrum is a way to improve communications and maximize co-operation. 
• Scrum is a way to detect and cause the removal of anything that gets in the way of developing and delivering products. 
• Scrum is a way to maximize productivity. 
• Scrum is scalable from single projects to entire organizations. Scrum has controlled and organized development and implementation for multiple interrelated products and projects with over a thousand developers and implementers. 
• Scrum is a way for everyone to feel good about their job, their contributions, and that they have done the very best they possibly could.

Scrum naturally focuses an entire organization on building successful products. Without major changes -often within thirty days - teams are building useful, demonstrable product functionality. Scrum can be implemented at the beginning of a project or in the middle of a project or product development effort that is in trouble.

Scrum is a set of interrelated practices and rules that optimize the development environment, reduce organizational overhead, and closely synchronize market requirements with iterative prototyes. Based in modern process control theory, Scrum causes the best possible software to be constructed given the available resources, acceptable quality, and required release dates. Useful product functionality is delivered every thirty days as requirements, architecture, and design emerge, even when using unstable technologies.

What is TFS?

Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server is an integrated collaboration server for Visual Studio Team System. It combines team portal, version control, work item tracking, build management, process guidance, and business intelligence into a unified server. It allows everyone on the team to collaborate more effectively and deliver better quality software.

Scope.

This document describes the advantages/disadvantages between several Scrum templates that can be used on VSTS 2005.

Used Scrum templates.

So this was the first part.  In the next part, we will talk about the installation process of the different templates.  So stay tuned.

Your TFS Scrummasters

Bart Wullems and Sven Cipido