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Call me weird, but when I create and maintain virtual machines for demonstration and training, I like to be in control of if/when Windows updates are installed. This is fit for purpose since I’m not using these VMs for production. In Windows 8.1 it was a straightforward setting …

Update: Added additional links for my same talks at VSLive! in San Francisco today (17 June, 2015)

Thank you to those who attended my two talks today. I enjoyed our conversation about Technical Debt and Professional Scrum Development.

Here are a few bookmarks that I mentioned during my talks …

Technical Debt

• HARD (Honest Appropriate Respectful Direct) communication
• Microsoft Pex (Microsoft Research)
• Microsoft Code Digger Extension (Visual Studio 2013)
• IntelliTest (Visual Studio 2015)

• Shuhari
• Measuring the Business Value of a PBI
• Using the Kanban Board to implement a Definition of Ready
• Use Excel to create repetitive work items
• Think about delivering value every Sprint
• Multitasking damages your brain and career (Forbes)

Attachment: ScrumRobot.zip

Teams often ask me for any shortcuts to periodically creating the same work items, such as for each sprint or release. In other words, they want to create the same Product Backlog Item or Task (but hopefully not Bugs) over and over.

My first suggestion is to use work item templates in TWA or TFPT to pre-populate fields. While helpful, this approach only helps with a single work item; but what about a series of work items? Excel is the answer (but you already knew that, didn’t you).

For Scrum Teams using TFS 2013 to create and manage their Product Backlog, they may want to take advantage of the new Agile Portfolio. This “higher level” backlog allows a team or organization to plan and track initiatives, features, epics, etc. The term “Feature” is the default, but with on-premises TFS, you can customize this.

Recently, a team I was working with renamed Feature to Epic, and then wanted to “promote” several of their current PBI work items to Epics. I supported this decision, because it helps keep the Product Backlog “pure” - only containing items than can actually be developed. I wrote a script to create Epics which were basically copies of the respective PBIs. Part of this script was to set the original PBI to the Removed state, but I wanted to add a new reason that was more meaningful than “Removed from the backlog”.

Watch out. This could happen to you and your team.

Let’s assume you have a single team project with three teams (Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato) …

Next, let’s assume you have Jake, a stakeholder, asking for access to the team project. You don’t want Jake to be able to add, edit, or delete anything, only to read data. Following MSDN’s guidance, you add Jake to the Readers group …

More and more teams are adopting a Definition of Ready (also known as DoR or Readiness Criteria) to avoid starting work on PBIs that are ill-defined, such as those that do not have clearly defined acceptance criteria. While some teams can do this implicitly, others want a formal definition to explicitly communicate this working agreement with their Product Owner and stakeholders. Some teams want to make this definition actionable, such as creating tasks to move a PBI through each Ready "gate".

Many Visual Studio and .NET announcements were made this week. A minor one was the RTM of Visual Studio 2013 Update 4. This update included improvements and bug fixes to Team Foundation Server 2013.

To satisfy my curiosity, as I’ve done in the past, I wanted to see what’s new in my favorite process template, so I downloaded the 2013.3 and 2013.4 versions and compared them using the tf folderdiff command …

tf folderdiff “Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2013.3” “Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2013.4” /recursive

Most of the guidance you’ll find about Visual Studio Ultimate Load Tests suggests that they are only for load testing Web Performance tests. Actually, they can be used to load other types of tests, such as unit tests. I demonstrated this at STARWEST last week. Instead of load testing the execution of a database or other service, I thought I would try something fun. I created a simple unit test that played a random tone using the beep command and then placed that under load.

Updated 20 May: Added presentations (but no videos) from the "Business of Software" track.

It took a few extra days to get these produced and published, but they are now on YouTube for your enjoyment.

• Welcome (Martin Hambalek)
• Keynote “It’s more than just writing code” (Ryan DeLuca) |
• “Data-driven decision making” (Dr. Vijay Dialani) |
• “The Rocket Ride” (Ryan Grisso) |
• “The new ‘Internet’ and how to leverage it” (Candace Sweigart) |
• “The Target breach was just the beginning” (Brad Wiskirchen) |
• “Preventing, Preparing For, and Protecting Your Company After a Data Breach” (Cece Gassner) |
• “The Role of Software in the ‘Automation of Normal’” (Randy Grohs) |
• “The Challenges of Moving from On-Premise to Cloud” (Jared Sund) |

I’ve attached links to the respective presentations. Hopefully you can correlate them with the videos.