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The MSF Behind TFS Session of the ALM User Group and a short promo for the 2010 Series
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This month, the group had a great opportunity to have Gadi Meir talk to us about the way he sees MSF. Gadi has received great reactions from the group during the session and after it via email and phone. This shows that MSF is far from being the simple templates that are a built-in ability in TFS and that Team System users should understand the concepts and paradigms behind it in order of making the most out of it.
You can download the MSF presentation (mostly Hebrew…) and also follow our the group RSS to be notified about the next session, both by Gadi and by others in the Team System community. In July we start a new and exciting initiative in the group and will be examining subjects in a series of sessions allowing multiple aspects and speakers to take part. The first series will be about VSTS 2010 and will start on July by a ‘Lap around 2010’ led by SRL consultant. Please subscribe to the group RSS to get the updated information about the lectures.
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Alerts and Notifications – some do and don’t rules about pull and push methods
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I spend my days working on Team System ALM projects and creating an environment of collaboration for development teams. One of the biggest benefits of implementing an ALM solution is the fact that everybody is aware and exposed to the status of the project (using a permissions mechanism when appropriate) and are able to respond and progress with their tasks in the project. Although the concepts sounds reasonable on the kickoff meeting, I’m always required to do a lot of buy-in to the process down the road of the actual implementation.
Some of the difficulties are about automating the ‘chain of command’ and the need to define team and personal queries to be used as a method of transferring tasks between team members. But most of the problems raise when users ask the most legitimate questions: ‘How will I know that something has change, do I need to run my queries all the time?’
My answer is both: yes and no.
Yes – because this is actually a very good practice: this is your pool of tasks and responsibilities so the first thing you should do when turning on your computer in the morning is checking your assignments (a note to Microsoft: it would be nice if the query results pane will refresh automatically)
No – because some tasks must be addressed on the spot and we cannot wait for the assigned person to manually pull them. for this kind of tasks and situations use the alert mechanism and make sure the notification is pushed immediately.
In TFS 2008, using TFPT, it is very simple to add a new alert, almost too simple (another note to Microsoft: can we use the already defined queries instead of declaring some of them all over again?) so please make sure you don’t overuse it. Although it is very nice to be in control and receive and email on every change, very fast the amount of emails will in your inbox will cover the real important notifications you do need to receive.
To summarize the above: ALM is here to help your team collaborate, save you time and money. Learn how to use it and create a reasonable mix between manual pulling and automatic pushing of notifications. And remember that you can always adjust the system and refine the queries and alerts to support the way that you want to work today!
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MSF Is Evolving
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The first time I’ve heard about MSF (Microsoft Solution Framework) is was a huge pile of documents and templates, covering the entire scope of the software manufacturing world, and than some more.. After spending several days reading and practicing, the feeling I’ve got was that this is actually the best source of development methodologies knowledge I came across but that the abundance of knowledge and it’s unstructured nature make it very difficult to implement.
Our second meeting was in 2005 in the MSF for agile template of team system. From the practical perspective I was very pleased to see that Microsoft has reduced the learning curve for using MSF and of course the managerial overhead required. But, I cannot ignore the fact that there is a huge gap between the old MSF and the minimalist version in Team System. It is true that if you bother to read and follow the documentation (can be found in the portal under ‘process guidance’) you will find a very logical, and moderately methodical MSF process covering the activities of the major role players with fair explanations about the best practices for using the work items, built-in reports and document templates. The problem is that most users do not find the time or energy to follow all that and from a quick survey I conducted lately the vast majority of users only use the bare minimum and use the work items (using the very basic fields) hence leaving out most of the benefits and tools that MSF contains.
How can this be solved? with awareness and good implementation skills… in my opinion, it is important to make sure that a new customer, starting to work with TFS will understand the basic concepts of MSF and the way they are implemented throughout the Team System platform. Just having a quick explanations about using work items is hardly enough.
I have so much more to say about the issue but since it will not fit here I will just make a short list of my coming posts related to this issue:
- Gadi Meir lecture at the ALM user group about MSF
- MSF 2005 (2008) vs MSF 2010
- MSF and Scrum
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MSF Agile on the MS ALM User Group – this Thursday
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This week, Gadi Meir will educate the participants of the user group in the methodologies and practices of MSF as are implemented as an integral part of Team Foundation Server and Team System.
Although almost every user of Team System has some knowledge of MSF (using the MSF for agile template) most of us only use the work item templates and forget about the logic behind them.
To learn about MSF as Microsoft intended for it to be please join us this week:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032417473&Culture=he-IL