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I’m curious. What do you enter in the Business Value field? Take this PBI work item for example …

According to MSDN you are supposed to type a number that indicates the relative business value of the item.

Awesome. Are we talking about money? new customers? a percentage decrease in lawsuits? the number of new followers on Twitter? Sure. Maybe. The problem is that the field is numerical, so you can’t get real creative on what you type in the field. You also can’t combine scales. In other words, I can’t have some PBIs measured in $ value and others in smiles. The scale has to be the same, which usually means there is no scale and the field sits idle.

Registration is now open for our Professional Scrum Developer Train The Trainer (TTT) event in Stuttgart, Germany on December 2-6, 2013. This will be the last such event this year.

We are looking for experienced trainers who, at their core, are solid software developers who use the Microsoft Visual Studio (2012/2013) ALM tools, know Scrum, and know the contemporary Agile software development practices.

As a Scrum.org trainer you will have a leading role in the evolution and maturity of Scrum to improve the profession of software development. As a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) for PSD courses, you will be recognized as a trusted expert in teaching people how to deliver real working software as part of a Scrum Development team. You will also enjoy these benefits:

• Schedule and deliver public or private PSD .NET courses
• Most PSTs can easily become certified to teach PSF at no cost
• Advertise public courses on http://courses.scrum.org
• Be listed on the Scrum.org trainer page http://www.scrum.org/Find-a-Scrum-Expert
• Leverage Scrum.org’s courseware and materials so you don’t have to maintain your own
• Network with other PSTs on dedicated discussion lists & at exclusive events
• Learn more about the benefits of becoming a Scrum.org Trainer

Qualified candidates will be invited to attend this event in Stuttgart. Candidates who are invited will receive more detailed information about the process for becoming a trainer. To submit an application or to learn more, use the links below.

Visual Studio 2013 will launch on November 13. You can join the festivities virtually from your workstation or mobile device. Watch the keynote speech live or at a later time. You can also hear how customers are already using Visual Studio and get detailed insight into using the product’s features and services by watching technical sessions conducted by the Microsoft development team. This will be the first launch available in multiple languages.

Updated 16 Sep, 2015 to freshen up the links

A few weeks ago I ran a free, half-day Agile software requirements workshop in Boise. There were over 100 attendees and we had good conversations about requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, behavior driven development, estimation, and story mapping.

Story mapping is a practice created by Jeff Patton that converts a flat Product Backlog into a picture. The map helps to group ideas, manage large stories, as well as plan, estimate and schedule a Sprint. Most importantly, it’s an information radiator that helps people understand the big picture and road map.

I was asked the other day how to rename a Team Project Collection.

There is a way, and it is more like a three card shuffle than anything else, and will work in TFS2010 and TFS2012.

The super quick guide: You detach the collection, and rename it on the reattach.

The step by step guide

You need to ensure that there are no builds or tests running, and have enough time to reset the build and test controllers and agents to point to the renamed collection. This is also assuming that you are going to keep the collection on the same SQL instance. so don’t need to consider the move from Enterprise to Standard edition (compression).

You can use TF.EXE STATUS to display information about pending changes to items in one or more workspaces. I use this prior to migrations to see what users have files checked-out and locked, and they types of pending changes I’m up against. The utility can give you two outputs: Brief and Detailed.

Brief looks like this:

If you’ve connected to the hosted Team Foundation Service lately, you’ve noticed a new version of the Scrum template is available …

Being the curious type, I connected to the service with Visual Studio 2012, downloaded the new template, and compared it with the 2.0 process template using the Compare tool in Visual Studio …

When you try to open a solution that is under Team Foundation Server Version Control for a TFS that you don’t have access to, you will receive the message "The solution you are opening is bound to source control on the following Team Foundation Server" …

Clicking Yes is pointless, because you don’t have access to the TFS. Your only option is to click No. When you No, you are shown a message that "The solution appears to be under source control, but its binding information cannot be found" …

I have just finished delivering a Team Foundation Course today, and we had some great discussions around TFS Administration, upgrading, adoption etc.

As usual, there is a whole pile of questions that you don’t have the time to go into in great detail, or you point out a thread.

Below is the list of items that came up for discussion:

Visual Studio 2010

Build

Visual Studio 2012

Visual Studio 2008

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