The Tempo when Teamwork meets Technology

November 2008 VOLUME 1

FEATURED ARTICLE

Welcome to The Tempo

Thank you.
Lori Borg Albeit unconventional, expressing my thanks to you seemed to be an appropriate way to begin the first column in our first newsletter. After all, you are the reason I’m sitting here on this crisp fall day reflecting on how Northwest Cadence can be of service to you, an important member of our software development community. So, thank you. We are excited to serve you.

Welcome to the November issue of "The Tempo", serving our community by sharing information, ideas, and industry insights on Visual Studio Team System and software development. As part of the decision to write this newsletter, we wanted to reach out and gather input from you to make this newsletter an applicable, interesting, and valuable resource in our software development community. Frankly, what’s the point of a newsletter if we aren’t effectively using it to bring value to you?

We have a great mix of articles, tips, and links, for your reading pleasure. When you’re done perusing, I’d love to hear from you, so please share your thoughts. The more we hear from you, the more tailored this newsletter will become. Tell us what you would like to see in terms of articles, surveys, and statistics. Tell us what we can do to get valuable and timely information to you via this publication, about our events, or our blog? Share with us what articles are particularly helpful, and what would you like to see more of. Simply put, how can we be of service to you?

In closing, thank you again. We enjoy being part of this community with you. Our team wishes you many things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving season.

Lori.Borg

President of Northwest Cadence

SPOT LIGHT

FREE Money! Do you Qualify?

Now more than ever, we are finding that our customers appreciate knowing what resources are available, particularly ones that actually bring real value and save hard cash. What free resource equates to real value and free money, you ask?/

Northwest Cadence, in partnership with Microsoft, will help fund Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Assessments for qualified customers across the United States.

So, what happens during an assessment? After an initial phone conversation outlining the goals and expectations of the assessment, a Northwest Cadence Practice Lead will spend several days onsite with your team, understanding your software development process, looking for efficiencies, and examining your current Team System implementation (if you have one). During these days onsite, we’ll talk with multiple stakeholders across key disciplines to create a finely detailed review of IT initiatives and development processes. At the completion of the engagement, you are provided with a comprehensive report that ranks ALM improvement priorities based on their impact to your business objectives. This report includes a specific plan to implement tighter team collaboration, increased traceability, additional automation, improved project management and more consistent quality.

Do you already have TFS installed? If so, we’ll also look at your current implementation and provide a gap analysis between the capabilities of TFS and your current processes. This will help you identify areas where TFS may need to be extended or where your process could be streamlined.

Finally, if you choose, you can use our ROI calculator to assess your expected ROI from your Team System implementation. For those of you who already have been using Team System, this is a very useful tool for determining whether you’re getting as much out of Team System as your industry peers are!

Get real value and free money. Contact Lori directly at Lori.Borg@nwcadence.com or 206.947.0967 so we can put this resource to work for you!

Here’s what some of our other customers have said about their ALM Assessments.

"The conclusions reached by the evaluators were accurate, timely, and well thought out. They had the ability to reach a broad audience and subsequently articulate their findings to management in a professional manner that will also facilitate a streamlined implementation of their recommendations."
"He was right on the money with his conclusions."
"The initiatives developed by the evaluators will be able to be implemented in that the evaluators broke their findings and recommendations down into modules such that they will provide immediate positive results and build upon each other to keep the momentum moving forward."
"Evaluator was knowledgeable, efficient and concise. Recommendations were right on."
"Based on his credentials, I had high expectations of Jeff Levinson and he met them. Jeff presented the material in a clear and concise manner, and provided helpful, logical reasons in support for all his arguments and recommendations."
"Their depth of knowledge is impressive and they are flexible enough to adapt their approach and industry standards to conform to and meet our business needs."

For more customer comments, please visit our Testimonials Page.

VSTS: TIPS

Hammering Home the Use of Power Tools

Without doubt, the single most important VSTS tip this month is… Install the VSTS Power Tools – October 2008 Release. These power tools dramatically improve on previous versions to give much needed functionality to the developers! And the single most useful feature (out of many very cool features) is, in my humble opinion, the Windows Shell Integration.

You can now do all of the most commonly used version control operations directly from Windows Explorer. As you can see in the image below, the Power Tools provide a graphical highlight for code under version control. Files and folders under version control are denoted by a green triangle, and when they are checked out for edit, they have a little pencil icon next to them. At any time you can right-click a file, and get the Team Foundation Server menu allowing you to Get Latest, Check In, Check Out, Delete, Move and Add, as well as other useful version control operations.

See Brian Harry’s blog post on the Power Tools October 2008 Release for all the details, or go directly to the TFS Power Tools download page.

EXPANDING YOUR KNOWLEDGE

Personify Design

If you're like many project managers or team leads, you accept bugs and change requests from users via e-mail since this is the natural way that users communicate needs.

If you're using TFS that generally means a manual cut and paste operation from the email to the TFS work item. Otherwise, you risk losing the request forever in the black hole of back e-mails.

TeamLook from PersonifyDesign(www.personifydesign.com) automates this process, making it far safer, reliable and fast. You simply open the e-mail, select the type of work item you want to create from the e-mail and it copies the information and submits it to TFS for you. TeamLook provides these features through its seamless integration with Microsoft Outlook. See the graphic to view TeamLook in action. Or better yet, contact us at Northwest Cadence for a free webcast demonstration of what TeamLook can do for you.

ASK SME (Subject Matter Expert)

VSTS 2010 - What is it Going to Take?

Dear SME,

With all the buzz around Visual Studio Team System 2010, what is it going to take to upgrade?

Signed,

Curious about Conversion

Dear Curious About Conversion:

This is a good question. VSTS 2010 is a major upgrade which opens up new possibilities and thus increases complexity and infrastructure requirements. The major infrastructure change that anyone looking to upgrade must know is that SQL Server 2005 will not be supported and SQL Server 2008 will be required. The recommended approach would be to look at upgrading to TFS 2008 SP1 and SQL Server 2008 in preparation for the VSTS 2010 release.

Some other major changes include dropping Office 2003 support and requiring Office 2007 or higher, full 64 bit support on the application tier, dropping WSS 2.0 support and supporting WSS 3.0 or higher as well as making the SharePoint portal an optional component entirely. Check out the Northwest Cadence Blog for more details on infrastructure changes surrounding VSTS 2010 and the impact they may have on your upgrade plans.

Signed,

Ask SME

UPCOMING EVENTS

FREE Winter Events

December 2: Coffee Talk – Visual Studio 2010 (Webcast)
You may have seen some of the fantastic new features of Visual Studio Team System 2010 (aka Rosario). Drastically improved automated testing, architect tools that actually work, and tons of improvements to make your lives easier and time spent more productive. We’ll cover several of the new features, and answer questions about the things you’re looking forward to. Bring your own questions, too!

To register, go to: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=132791

December 4: Eagerly Awaiting VSTS 2010? (Kirkland)
Join Northwest Cadence and explore the new features of Visual Studio Team System 2010 and what it means for your business, productivity, application management, and quality. During this event, we will cover Team Foundation Server and the much-hyped hierarchical work items, new improvements to History, Merge, Work Item Queries, and the focus on Agile development.

Numerous improvements from the Architecture edition (including full support for UML 2.x) will be demonstrated, including the new Architecture Explorer which allows you to quickly and easily visualize an application from the high level down to the object dependencies.

We will also highlight many Developer edition functionalities such as updated tools for performance profiling, the Historical Debugger (formerly called “Proteus”), and the ability to view affected tests based on changes to the code.

Finally, we will cover the Test Edition with a focus on the “Camano” user interface, Manual Test Runner, Test Case Management, and how Team System 2010 is a strong and reliable testing platform.

To register, go to:http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=132801

December 16: Coffee Talk – Reporting (webcast)
You may have seen some of the fantastic reports TFS provides out of the box at conferences and presentations. We will answer lots of questions in this session: Have you wondered why the reports at your company don’t look quite as nice? Are they missing enough data to make decisions? What reports should you pay special attention to (Project Managers), and why should you even care about the reports (developers)? We will also cover a few of things you need to do to really get the data into the reports and talk about how to interpret some of our favorite reports. And, if you ask, we’ll cover how to interpret your favorites, too!

To register, go to: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=132792

December 30: Coffee Talk – Software Development Lifecycle
With the thousands of books and articles published on Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC), do you ever feel overwhelmed sorting through what is hype vs. what is actually being adopted by .NET corporations? During this Coffee Talk, we will answer this question plus others that you bring! We will explore the complexity of software development, the current best practices for improving your Software Development Life Cycle, and industry best practices and the latest IT research.

To register, go to:http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=132794