Hi all -   Well, the MSBuild Team is growing, and I have a job opening (see here for the full job description).  I'm looking for someone with smarts, drive, a team-player mentality, an obsession with quality, and least two years of industry experience.  You need not have deep experience with build technologies (but...

Hi all -   With sprint 5 done, we are now in a quiet period, as we have balanced most of the resources on our project toward helping Whidbey get finished.  We will probably pull some resources back soon, however.   I have been thinking about how to get the part of our team that isn't using Scrum onto the Scrum model.  It's...

There was a question from Dave Froslie on what we use to store our Product Backlog.  We use an internal wiki page.  Wiki's are nice because they're easy to view, easy to edit (not only for the Product Owner but also for people with suggestions who can add them in a suggestion section at the bottom for the Product Owner to prioritize...

Hi all –   A reader named Steve Henke writes with some questions:   First, you mentioned your concern about waterfall being used in the next major division release but with even more centralized control than before. Why do you expect more centralized control? Because of results from your team's Scrum efforts or other external...

I got a question from René Landgrebe about what development methods we use along with Scrum.  He writes: "I wonder what developing method you use in combination with SCRUM. I read about combining XP and SCRUM is very reasonable. So, what combination do you use? XP, Test-driven development, feature-driven... ???" Scrum doesn't dictate...

Greetings all –               Well, sprint 5 ended and yesterday we had the sprint review.  Overall the sprint was successful, although we did have one work item bleed over (which we of course disclosed to the stakeholders at the sprint review).   We had small turnout from...

It seems like forever since I got eight hours of decent sleep.  I love my kids, but it sure would be nice if they would sleep past 6am!  My wife is on me for drinking too much pop -- she thinks 4 a day is too many (if only she knew it was more like 5 or 6!).  I figure Diet Coke and Diet Mountain Dew can't be that harmful -- if...

Greetings all –  It would seem that our estimates are slowly getting better with time.  When I compare the burndown chart for sprint 5 with the prior three charts, it’s quite good.  The first three look like a silhouette of the Olympic mountain range, whereas sprint 5 trends downward fairly nicely.  Sprint 5 is showing a...

Hi all –   A reader named David Wylie wrote and commented the following (I’m posting his question here with his permission):   I am new to scrum, and one of the selling points is significantly increase productivity. Have you experienced this, or is it just a different way of managing?   This is an interesting question. ...

Well, yesterday after much time spent learning the subtleties of Excel’s SUMIF formula and the difference between B7 and $B$7, I was able to add a handy new feature to our daily scrum spreadsheet: the ability to sum up the work remaining by person.  I added a graph too.   I know, I know, it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s very...

Today Dave Froslie was visiting Redmond from the Fargo MSFT site, and gave a talk to a VS team about Scrum, which I also attended as an observer.  It was a good meeting, and I'm hopeful that this team will give Scrum a try.  I invited them to our team's daily scrum meeting -- we'll see if they come! A big challenge for everyone...

Greetings all –   Well, our Product Owner got the product backlog ready in time for the first sprint planning meeting, where we pick the product backlog items we’ll use for the sprint.  This planning meeting happened yesterday & went pretty smoothly, and everyone seems to feel pretty good about the product backlog items...

Greetings all -   Well, next week we’re going to start sprint 5.  We had a couple of weeks between the end of sprint 4 & the start of sprint 5, mainly since we had some distractions like an office move and a whole-team offsite fixing bugs for the main MSBuild product.   One of the troubling phenomena we’ve run into is...

Well, my dear readers, I’m pleased to report that we got things pulled together for sprint 4 and are on track to complete it successfully today, barring unforeseen complications.   One of the problems we’ve had is that our overarching mission timeline is basically impossible, and most of us on the effort have known it, either...

Dear Readers -   Please be advised that my blog is moving to http://weblogs.asp.net/cflaat (but I don't have any content there yet).  See you there soon. Chris