Task Board for Team System – finally!

I have been quite harsh to the Conchango Scrum template for Team Foundation Server, and I actually didn’t like it when I used it last (8 months ago).

That primarily had to do with me being forced to use the standard, heavy-weight forms in Visual Studio to edit Backlog Items and Actions. That did that we couldn’t use it in our daily scrums and hence someone (read: me) had to take notes and then go an update the TFS. In lean terms this was WASTE that was added to our project. I didn’t like that one bit. So we stopped using it. Quickly.

But now Conchango has created the tool that I think was the missing link. A Task Board application that mimics the actual task board that you draw and edit during sprints, planning and daily scrums.

You can...

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Why do TDD?

I haven’t done TDD for a very long time and I still am waiting for my first BDD project in real life. In fact I sometimes have a problem to describe the goodness.

But Gregg Pollack has done the same journey as I have and he has also done this great presentation on why TDD is good and how to use it.

Sadly that video is long gone. Sad, because it was a good presentation.

This is such a great presentation where he takes us through a series of points that explains the rationale of TDD and then BDD, or the “pathway to developer enlightenment”, as he calls it. I have extracted his points here:

  1. Testing breeds confidence
  2. If you write tests before you write your code, you end up writing better code
  3. Well written tests are just as good, if not better...
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More great stuff on BDD

I have been doing some more reading on BDD, and I like it more and more, the more I read about it. I am working from my house today and Elin is getting a bit annoyed from every time I call out “Yes”, or when I am trying to explain how good this is.

The main thing for me, right now, is that using the BDD-technique gives you a way to derive the requirements in a iterative and exploring way. And in the language of the experts (the ubiquitous language).

I also is fond of the strict structure of a story and it’s scenario that Dan North describes in this article. Mainly because it gives you guidance in the process (“what is the next important thing the system doesn’t do”). Here are some other reasons from Mike Cohn

Being strict...

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Pomodoro – being agile and focused on the individual level

I have been introduced to a new concept called The Pomodoro Technique. It’s a way to work in a very focused and lean way, on the individual level (it can also be used for groups).

From what I’ve learned so far it seems very powerful and is something that I sure will be reading more about, and try to use for myself. I often have trouble to keep my focus on the task at hand and the Pomodoro Technique seems like a great way of handling that.

Here are some resources that I found on the subject:

And finally a great lightning talk by Staffan Nöteberg on the problems that Pomodoro sets out to solve. In Swedish I am afraid…

Pomodoro Talk

Here...

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Some great SOA – articles

I am preparing a talk on SOA. That always scares me since it’s such a big topic. Who among us would want to answer the question “What is SOA?”

OK – in my preparations I found some great resources.

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Booting from a VHD in Windows 7

OK – I have been playing around for a while with my Windows 7 and up to now I love it! It even got my old Dell Precision M70 (4 years old and as many kilos) to look good again.

I am also trying to setup a lab environment for Visual Studio 2010 and TFS Server 2010 and found this great video and introduction on how to do that.

However, since my system is slow and low on memory, it doesn’t play to well with running the whole thing (Windows 2008 Server, SQL Server 2008, TFS Server 2010 and Visual Studio 2010) in Virtual PC.

So I was very happy when I found this post from Scott Hanselman. Here is an excellent video that shows you how it’s done.

In short there is now support to...

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I am back working

Sooo - the parental leave is now over. I have spent six months “not-working” and together with my son, Albert. It has been great but when looking back it seem like the time has passed very fast.

OK - so now I am offically back in business. Well, by the way, let’s see if there is anything for me to do first. Otherwise I’ll be “free” for a little while longer. We’ll see.

What I have done so far is just updated my CV. That’s always rewarding since it seems like you have done a lot of important work…

And now I have put way to much time into installing Windows 7. I have had a real hard time to do it from a USB-stick. But here is a great a description on how to install Windows 7 from USB-stick.

From that I’ll try to install Visual...

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Parental leave reading

I am slowly but certainly coming to an end of my parental leave. Six months without working! They have disappeared so quickly… It’s a bit sad.

But I also feel “hungry” for work. Especially to put my newly acquired skills and knowledge into use (TDD, ASP.NET MVC, BDD, DDD etc.)

I have done some reading during my leave, (I am actually proud of reaching a lot of the goals I set up for myself on the last day of working) and I thought that I could give a short review of the books here.

Clean Code by Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin was really good in one sense and quite annoying in another. Don’t get me wrong – this is a classic and a very good read. There are loads and loads of good tips and trick on how...

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Vacation time and stress management

Yes, I know that some people will refer to Seinfeld and the episode where George go on a vacation when being without a job, but it’s true - my vacation starts tomorrow. What that means is that I am going to Hyppeln on the west coast of Sweden. It will be great and hopefully with some better weather than we have had the last few weeks…

I learned something today that the Sunday morning service. It has been quite a stressful week with loads of meeting in the calendar, big things to ponder and surgery for Albert… And I got quite stressed out. When that happens to me I can’t really focus and so I get more stressed out for things that I might miss. It’s a viscous circle. Also it tend to happen more and more frequently.

But the sermon today spoke almost...

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Great introduction to BDD

BDD (Behavior Driven Development) is the next natural evolvement from TDD. And since I am now converted to TDD I thought I’d look into BDD.

Well – after scanning the net for a while I finally found a introduction that I could understand. Here it is:http://dannorth.net/introducing-bdd

From what I understand some colleagues implemented BDD with NUnit. You can read about it here (in Swedish I am afraid), and also get some code that can help you create some documentation á la agiledox.

OK – the next thing to chew off… BDD looks cool.

**[UPDATED] **I have now read some stuff about BDD and Dan North (who wrote the article above) is, to my understanding, the father of BDD and that article is actually the birth of the subject. Pretty good introduction.

Here is a video that has some nice examples...

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