Managing work in Team Foundation Services
Create a Team Foundation Services Account Link Visual Studio to Team Foundation Services Add User Stories and Delivery Team Tasks
Airline club membership Is it worth it
On an early Monday flight I pretty much have the whole United club to myself… If you have ever thought about United Club membership before I offer a little food for thought: If you spend as much time at the airport as I do (or even way less) think of club membership in terms of …
The Increasing Cost of Technical Debt
The cost of defects increases exponentially as they slip down the delivery pipeline a shift left in quality, security and stability goes a long way toward reducing costs. We must make a shift left in quality, security and stability by surfacing defects earlier in the Delivery pipeline as defects get exponentially more expensive as they …
DevOps Key Metrics
What I find most compelling about the DevOps metrics listed below is the fact that control of almost all of the metrics can be gained by mastering the first metric in the list. The metric that seems to tame all others is the Number and Frequency of deployments / software releases. If we strive for …
Where to track infrastrucure tasks
I was doing some digging around for opinions on how and where to manage infrastructure tasks on the backlog in a Scrum / Agile project. http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/61529/how-does-a-scrum-team-account-for-infrastructure-tasks-in-the-planning-meeting
What is DevOps
Its an organization wide cultural shift toward delivering value to the end customer.
Acceptance Criteria, Are we DONE yet?
When working on an Agile Project, solution requirements are gathered through meetings between the customer and the Product Owner and potentially a Business Analyst. Unlike requirements from a traditional Waterfall project the solution requirements for an Agile Project are written is a simple nontechnical format that is easily consumable by all project stakeholders. Project stakeholders …
Slicing User Stories Method 1
Slice by Happy vs. Unhappy Path Any feature or method that we add to our solution will have happy and one or more unhappy paths. The happy path describes how the feature will behave when everything goes according to plan. If there are any errors exceptions or omissions then the unhappy path is taken. Consider a …
Slicing User Stories 7 Methods
In an Agile Development Project, the Solution Requirements are communicated from the customer to the delivery / development team using a standard notation easily understood by the delivery team and all stakeholders. This standard notation is known as a User Story. See our post on What Makes a Good User Story for more details. When committing a …
Storing Infrastructure Secrets in Script
When migrating your organizations culture to the DevOps way automation is a key component. Not only automation of builds and testing but also automation of infrastructure components. As I’m sure most readers are aware the build out of infrastructure components usually requires elevated permissions using credentials that we would prefer not be widely published. How …