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.

After his last great post about the difference between CI and Build Automation tools, Roy Osherove posted the next part about this.  Now he gives us 18 questions to ask when choosing CI and Automated Build tools.  It's a nice list of questions, so read this article http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2010/01/21/18-questions-to-ask-yourself-when-choosing-continuous-integration-and-build-automation-tools.aspx and the next time consider using this list when you have to make a choice.

Roy Osherove has posted a nice article about the difference between Continuous Integration Tools and Automated Build Tools.  Read it here: http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2010/01/14/the-difference-between-continuous-integration-tools-and-automated-build-tools.aspx

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)

When you get this error using TSWA, the solution is to recycle the Apppool of TSWA.
Go to your TFS Application tier and start IIS to recycle the pool.

But here at work, this error pops up, a few times each month.  So for a final solution read the TSWA Scalability Limits White paper: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ee378d7b-45c3-4690-bd06-a060cfa43b06&displaylang=en

All requirements described in this document, where OK for us.  But still we had the problem.  So we took the third solution in this document and every night we run a job that recycles the App_pool.  Now out problem is solved.

A quick guide about one of the Free Telerik TFS tools. So here we go.

After my last blog about these two tools, I had time to test both tools.  In this post, I put my attention to the dashboard as several teams here want to have something like this.

In my earlier post, I stated that I couldn't get it up.  Txs to Joel Poiron, I saw it was because my system couldn't copy the builderror.wav file into the Telerik dashboard folder in MyDocuments.

After some investigation at my site, I became aware that there was a policy which doesn’t allow us to copy music files on this folder (it's a network folder).

So after talking to security, my account was disabled for this policy and I was able to copy music files.  This problem, solved I run again the dashboard and there it was running smoothly.

And it works very fine.  I just took the default settings of widgets and added 3 projects.  For testing purposes, I reduced the recycle time to 30 seconds instead of 300.

See here some screenshots.

 

Project using the Conchango Scrum template 2.2, using TFS full blown and all the widgets.

Project using the Conchango Scrum template 2.2, using not everything in TFS and all the widgets.

Project using the Conchango Scrum template 1.2, using not everything in TFS and all the widgets.

As you can see, even with the last project, the dashboard still runs, but some widgets can't be used.

So a little about how to setup and configure the dashboard.
You can start up the dashboard din two ways:

1. Directly by clicking the Telerik TFS Project Dashboard
2. From within the Work Item Manager

Just one reminder, if you have the dashboard already running, you will get a message when starting it the second time to close the first session.

We will focus now only on the first method.
When the dashboard has started, you will see that there are no projects to display.

Just press F2 to go to the configuration screen.

You will see the configuration screen.  On the first tab you could change some basic settings.  Click on the projects tab at the left side.

Here you can add and configure the projects you want to see.  So click "Add project".  You will get the standard TFS project selector window.  Choose the TFS server and the project.
Next you will get a question where to store the User settings.  this can be on your TFS server in the selected project or locally on the computer.  You can always change this later.

Make your selection.  Now that the project is added, you need to change the configuration to work with your TFS.  First see if the default basic settings are good for you, otherwise just change them.  Next press configure to configure the widgets to use, the TFS datawarehouse connection string,...

When the config screen is open, you see that you need to setup the connection string first.  But you also have tabs for the images.  Opening this will give you the list of TFS users.  Here you can add for each user a nice picture .  Also there are tabs for every widget that can be used in the dashboard.  I'm not going into detail for the widgets.  Just see and you will see how easy it is to configure them.  or you can leave them with the default values.

Press save to store the info.  Next you can add another project or press save here and view your beautiful TFS project dashboard.

For the moment we already have 2 teams (with a total of 8 projects) who are interested in this dashboard after seeing my POC.  Instead of a 19" monitor like I have, we will supply them a nice 30" monitor....

Some (personnel) thoughts about it:

1. You can't change the path where to store your settings,...  It's always in MyDocuments.  So when you have like us a policy that you can't store music files on it, it won't work, because it will copy one .wav file.  I hope in the next version you can choose your storage path.
2. The startup is slow.  It took several minutes to start up.
3. Best is to use a dedicated PC.  Because starting up another application will result in performance loss of the Dashboard.
4. Mostly the memory and processor usage is very good.  But I had a few times where the process performance went up to 70% and the memory usage up to 1.6 GB.  When this is the case, you better kill the process, because pressing f.e. F2 will result in waiting for more than 5 minutes and nothing more than hanging of the application happened.
5. It's free and very good.  Even the support is great.
6. It's beta for the moment, keep that in mind.
7. Two system requirements are needed:
• VS 2008 Team Explorer
• .Net 3.5 SP1 runtime

I'm eager to see the first official release.

A little psychology.  Michael Dubakov has wrote a nice blog post about saying no when using Kanban.  especially for your WIP limit.  Read it here : http://www.targetprocess.com/blog/2009/12/kanban-psychology-can-you-say-no.html

Learn this has posted a great article about finding leaders for your company and why it is so hard.  They have included 2 real life examples.  Go and read it: http://learnthis.ca/2009/12/the-problem-with-leadership/ 

Sometimes you go to a site and you got a lot of irritations, just by visiting it.  Well, you can search for another site, but there are times, that you just need that site.

Well here in Belgium we have such a site: The Yellow Pages.

Why is it irritating?  Well today I search for a pharmacist in my neighbourhood.  No problem at all.  But the result shows me first 12 other store about shops who do shop equipment.  Even shops from more than 100 km out of my neighbourghood.  The worst part was, that I needed to scroll down to see my search results.  This is so bad.

Picture above shows (in Dutch) what I wasn't looking for, but still gives them on the first place.

Picture above: Finally, after scrolling down and passing 12 non relevant search results, I got what I was looking for.