Blog

  • Lessons learned from a great team.

    In the midst of transitioning to a new job, I felt it would be wise to take a minute to reflect on some of the lessons learned working with the talented team of developers at the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency.

    When I joined this team in August of 2009, they had recently gone through the departure of their department manager, and in response were adopting Agile as a development methodology. They faced the uphill battle of reestablishing trust among the other business units, and were in the process of migrating a legacy system in preparation for adding new features.

    In 16 months time, we completed the system migration, and delivered on two major business initiatives, earning high praise from both the end users and organization’s leadership. Additionally, we implemented and migrated our work to Team Foundation Server, conducted a pretty significant architectural overhaul, and doubled the size of our team as new work emerged.

    I feel proud to have been part of the team at NCHFA, and it is in their honor that I share these lessons learned. I hope to be able to apply these lessons as necessary with the team I am joining.

    1. Planning and prioritization is a daily discipline. Nearly every activity our team spent time on fell in to one of the following categories of planned work:

    • In-Sprint project work – tasks specifically contained in our Agile sprint.
    • Helpdesk items – end user support of our production systems, under 40 hours
    • Pipeline items – projects in excess of 40 hours of work
    • BPI (Business Process Initiatives) – multi-project initiatives in excess of 100 hours of work.

    Every week, in a standing, Monday at 10am meeting, our entire team would provide status and updates on all work across these categories.  This simple practice of routinely reviewing, re-prioritizing and re-assigning work as necessary allowed every member of our team, as well as our management to have a complete picture of the entire team’s workload and progress.

    2. Trust the process of debating an issue. During our sprint planning, and especially during the lead up to re-architecting our systems, there were many instances when we as a team didn’t always see eye to eye.  More than any other team I have been a member of, the level of honest and respectful debate that we had was significant to our success.

    3. Start manually, then automate. There is no lack of tools to help teams manage the Agile software development process.  But for nearly the first year of working together, our team relied on index cards and sticky notes.  By adhering to a fully manual process, it allowed our team to work out the necessary adaptations and adjustments to our usage of Agile and become experts both individually and collectively of the methodology.  At the point in time when we elected to implement a project management tool, in our case Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010, we knew how to run our sprints and manage our stories so well that adopting the tool was nearly effortless.  The result is that our usage now of TFS was able to take full advantage of its features for planning, reporting and tracking our progress.

    4. Demonstrate your results across the organization. With few exceptions, we provided an open invitation to the entire organization to attend our end of sprint product demonstration.  In these meetings, we used a few Powerpoint slides to review all our previous sprints, which reminded the business groups of the overall project progress and decision points along the way.  We then gave a full, live demonstration of the new functionality we delivered in the last sprint.   By showing our progress along the larger project timeline on a routine basis, our team established a significant level of trust from the business groups.  We simply let our delivered, working code speak for itself.

    It was my pleasure to be part of the team at NCHFA, and I look forward to hearing from them about the results they will continue to produce in the months to come.  Congratulations to Joe, Tim, Dan, Eric, Steve, Dev and Jaime for all you’ve achieved over the last year.

  • Unit Testing Concepts, Tools and Best Practices

    The following is a presentation I made to our team as we were planning out how to incorporate unit testing in to our development process.

  • A new job lies ahead.

    It is always exciting to make a change, and even more so when that change brings forth new opportunities and challenges.

    In a little less than a week, I’ll be joining the software development team at RMSource, an IT Consulting firm in Cary, NC, as a Senior Developer.

    It has been my pleasure to work with the IT Development team at the NC Housing Finance Agency for the past year or so.  I have learned a lot from that team, and hope that I have been able to make a positive contribution.

  • Gearing up

    Call it jumping on the bandwagon.  Call it being inspired from the likes of Scott Hanselman, Jeff Atwood and Phil Haacked.  Whatever the reason, I’ve decided its time to start blogging about being a developer.

    To kick this off, I’ll be posting a few entries from offline writing and research I’ve completed.

  • TFS Migration: Sharing common code

    In this latest installment of recording our team’s migration to Team Foundation Server 2010, I’ll be describing how we organized and share our common code libraries.

    The scenario is quite common. We have a Application that provides specific line of business functionality. It leverages several Common libraries that provide underlying functionality that are used by all of the Applications built and supported by our team.

    Previously, when using Visual SourceSafe, we would share these libraries by using the ‘Add Project from Source Control’ feature in Visual Studio to add the common projects to our Application’s solution.

    TFS guidance offered several approaches to sharing these libraries across Applications. The primary approaches are:

    1. Workspace Mapping – add a directory mapping to your workspace for the shared library so it will be updated to your local box alongside your application’s directory structure. This is essentially a client-side solution, since Workspaces are managed on the local development system.
    2. Branching and Merging – use the improved Branching capability in TFS to branch the common project into the source control structure of the application project. This is essentially a server-side solution, since the branched code is maintained by Source Control and will be updated by anyone who does a ‘Get Latest’ on the project directory.

    We have adopted the Branching and Merging approach, but it was not without a lot of experimentation of both methods. In the end, here were the key factors in our choice.

    1. Server side vs. client side. A big part of our goal in organizing our projects is the ability to set up a new development environment quickly. The server side Branch and Merge strategy supports this goal by eliminating one more step (that is, configuring the Workspace) in preparing a new dev environment.
    2. Isolation of potential changes. While it is more and more infrequent, changes do occur to the common libraries. By leveraging a Branch, the branched copy of the common project is isolated from all other consumers of that library, until the changes are merged in to the Main branch for the common library. If we were using the Workspace mapping approach, a check-in of changes would go straight to the Main branch of the shared project, which could cause a ripple effect through other Applications that are using the common code.

    Still, there are other implications and adjustments for our development team, primarily propogating changes. In the case when a change to a common library is merged back to the Main branch, and it is appropriate to propogate those changes to all other consumers, a new effort is required to forward merge the common code out to its consumers. This effort is compounded if the consumer Application itself has multiple branches that would all need the updates. However for our team, this is an acceptable trade off since a) changes are infrequent, and b) the number of consuming applications is manageable. Furthermore, as we continue to expand our automated Build setup, propogation may be something that can be scripted in as part of a nightly build of the common projects.

    For more information about these approaches, you can check out the Patterns & Practices guidance for Team Development with TFS.

  • TFS Migration: Branching and Merging Strategy

    As we are evaluating and planning our migration to Team Foundation Server 2010, considerations for adopting a Branching and Merging strategy for our source control projects has demanded a lot of our attention.

    While using Visual Source Safe, our team rarely if ever used Branching to isolate project so they can be developed or supported in parallel with our main effort. VSS wasn’t so great at executing branching and merging, and we, like many, chose to err on the side of caution and forego branching altogether.

    In TFS Source Control, it seems branching and merging have been improved to a level of comfort where we as a team can have some confidence that executing a branch or merge operation won’t lead us to spend more time cleaning up rather than moving on and doing the development work itself.

    In the end, we have largely concluded to use branches to isolate our releases, but not to isolate our normal development during a sprint. As such, our Main (or Trunk) branch will be the primary (and consequently slightly unstable) code line. After each release, we will create a branch for that deployed version of the product for maintenance purposes.


    Here are some of the key factors in our decision:

    1. branches require a level or “care and feeding” that (for our relatively small team, at least) would have not yielded any great value for our normal development sprint. We rarely have divided teams working on the same product, or long running feature development in parallel to working our product backlog.
    2. branching complicates IIS hosted applications. We choose to use IIS, rather than the Visual Studio Development Server, to host our applications during development. Consequently, every branch requires a reconfiguration of IIS to point to the site’s directory contained in that branch. While this reconfiguration be scripted (as demonstrated here) it still is another step that the developer has to remember to perform.
    3. branching is further complicated when you have shared code libraries that must be replicated to every new branch. While there are some clever approaches to managing workspaces or using Build scripts to update branches, you can alleviate the whole issue by minimizing the branches you create.
    4. we do not have a formal QA team that would require a stable Main branch for testing purposes. Our adoption of Agile is such that our peer reviews and testing are integrated in to our sprint, and consequently we are not ‘handing off’ our product to another team to exercise. If there were a QA team, then it certainly would be more important to keep a highly stable Main branch, and that would merit spawning a new Branch for ongoing development. In our case, it’s just not necessary.

    It is nice to know that TFS Source Control makes branching and merging a more trustworthy operation, and that the tools are there when we need them. But for now, we’ll take the simple road.

  • TFS Migration Resources

    As I am doing research and preparing for our migration to Team Foundation Server, lots of various resources are emerging to assist in our planning. It seemed appropriate to make a list of these items and provide some commentary on their content and relevance to our efforts.

    Codeplex based resources
    patterns & practices Team Development with TFS Guide (Final Release)
    This online guide provides a decent overview of how to leverage TFS for your development team. While it has not been updated (so far as I can tell) to reflect TFS 2010, many of the concepts and descriptions are relevant and applicable with the latest version of the product.

    Visual Studio TFS Branching Guide 2010
    One of the major choices we are facing in the midst of our migration is whether to move into using branching and merging as part of our development process. The guides provided by the so-called ‘Visual Studio ALM Rangers’ give very clear overviews and explanations of the various strategies surrounding branching your code and organizing your project.

    MSDN based resources
    Team Foundation Server 2010 Resources page
    MSDN, true to its mission, provides plenty of source material about TFS directly from Microsoft. You can start with the TFS Installation Guide, then move to the Getting started with Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management to get a good basic understanding of the parts and pieces that make up the TFS product.

    Blogs

    The Woodward Web
    Brian Harry – Brian Harry was one of the original developers of SourceSafe, and is now part of the Team Foundation Server product team at Microsoft.

    As I find additional resources, I’ll update this list.

  • Migrating to Team Foundation Server 2010: Preamble

    About a year ago, I led an effort to introduce the organization where I work to automated unit testing, continuous integration and automated deployment as part of the development process. We implemented CruiseControl.NET, wrote and refined dozens of NAnt scripts, and in the end, established a working CI environment for our project, complete with nightly builds, one-click deployment to our test environment, and execution of NUnit tests, code analysis and creation of API documentation.

    This year, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010, and with it a new release of Team Foundation Server, and our team has all come together to work towards implementing TFS into our environment. With that implementation, the existing CruiseControl.NET build environment will give way to TFS Build, and I will use this blog to document and share the planning, process and lessons learned as part of migrating a medium sized application in to TFS as Team Projects.

    In the coming weeks, we’ll be making decisions about things such as:

    1. How to structure our projects in TFS Source Control.
    2. How to organize our Solutions and Team Projects.
    3. How to map our current CI process to the TFS Build workflow.
    4. How to manage our Agile/Scrum process using TFS Work Items.

    As a prelude, here’s a brief overview of the application we’re working with.

    Ours is an intranet application for project management and workflow handling. The basic structure follows a n-Tier architecture, though we are using Dependency Inversion. The component parts include:

    • An ASP.NET Web site project
    • A Utility library for common functions.
    • A DataAccess library for database access.
    • A Workflow library for common workflow functions.
    • A Core library, defining our business entities, data access interfaces, and service methods.
    • A Data library, which implements our actual database calls.
    • A Controller library, which is a go-between for the Web Site pages and our Core layer.
    • 2 libraries containing integration to 3rd party product APIs.
    • Several unit Test libraries for the Core, Controller and Workflow libraries.

    All told, our Visual Studio solution contains 16 projects.

    We also have a project containing our common NAnt build scripts and CruiseControl.NET configuration files, and each individual project has a NAnt build script governing the build for that assembly.

    The Utility, DataAccess and Workflow assemblies are shared with other applications.

    Finally, we have about a half-dozen 3rd party Assemblies that we use, which includes the Microsoft Enterprise Library, Telerik UI controls, and Aspose Word.

    In planning our migration, we must be able to continue to allow the Shared Assemblies to be accessible and used by other projects, as well as maintain all the functionality NAnt and CC.Net provides.