TFS 2015 RC & VS 2015 RC announcements at //BUILD/

As expected there is a bunch of stuff being announced at //BUILD/.

Catch some of the highlights of TFS & VS 2015 from Brian's post and for a more comprehensive list of changes and features go here

Time to play  

Agile : Failing is a good thing!

I've had this discussion a couple of times over the last number of years, and people tend to not believe me when I say that in the Agile world, we want to fail!
For emphasis I will repeat that : In the Agile world we want to fail

Let that sink in a bit…

OK, now that you think I am full of it and must not have a clue as to what I'm speaking about, lets continue.

Waterfall or Structured methodologies / processes
Let's take the example of a waterfall approach. We analyse the work, get to development and finally deliver the functionality. The only problem is that this could take anywhere from months to years to get the first working software out there.. And now the customer or client can look at it and decide that this is not what they wanted in the first place or the business has changed making it irrelevant.

Here are some very interesting numbers on failing software...
The Standish group released some stats last year stating that "Only 9% of projects in large companies were successful." and that "The most projects, 37.1%, were impaired and subsequently cancelled (Resolution Type 3) in medium companies, compared to 29.5% in large companies and 21.6% in small companies."

With this high rate of failure, how can it possibly be good? Well it is not! Failure is never good, but it is inevitable. What we do however strive for is to mitigate the losses that are incurred due to the failure.
How do we do this?

Fail fast fail often…

Agile methodologies / processes
In contrast to the structured "long running" processed described above, in agile we get working software into the hands of customers, business or clients as soon as possible. They can then interrogate it and communicate where the problems (if any) are and what needs to be done differently or how to fix it. We can then"pivot" to fix the issues, change the focus or scrap unnecessary functionality to continue delivering business value.
The difference here is that if we do "fail", we lose an iteration's worth of work, which should be 2 - 3 weeks. Compare this to the months or years that a structured process could take...

Another difference is that we can then learn from the mistake, make an adjustment and continue delivering value. In structured processes the monolith has been developed and you may very well be too far down the path to make the required changes or fix the issues.

In a nutshell:

Failure is not good, but it is inevitable. Things are changing too rapidly for us to start with a plan and be able to deliver relevant software months/years later.

We need to deliver small chunks of work that can be interrogated and evaluated, gather that feedback and communication and adjust what and how we do things to mitigate the risk and exposure of the failures or losses!

End of TFS 2010 Mainstream Support

Wow, time flies. I can remember going to the launch and being really exited about the "major" changes that TFS 2010 brought with it.

And now, it is at the end of its mainstream support…

Looking back, it is amazing how much has changed since TFS 2010 to TFS 2013 and even what is coming in TFS 2015.

Here is to some exiting times!

BTW: if you are considering upgrading to maintain support, feel free to give us a shout.

ALM days 2015 - Byte sized sessions : 11 June 2015

The first of 4 ALM sessions planned for Cape Town will take place on 19 March 2015* 11 June 2015 at the Microsoft Office in Pinelands.
Session topics:
What’s new in TFS ALM
We look at what has happened in the world of TFS in the last year. The new bits and pieces and some of the licensing changes that came into play making TFS much more affordable and accessible.

Real World Session: Let’s talk Release Management
MS Release Management is a great tool for pushing software into different environments. We hear some real world experiences on how RM can be used to move issues into production very quickly or alternatively leverage it to make your life a lot easier.
Register to join us.
Thank you to Microsoft for sponsoring the venue for this session.

*Note: Due to unforeseen circumstances we have had to re-schedule. We are looking forward to seeing you on the new date!

TFS 2013 Update 4 finally released

For those of you who do not know, Microsoft released TFS 2013 update 4 with their Connect(); event yesterday/last night.

Some of the really cool stuff that I have been waiting for is the introduction of the Stakeholder licensing and Trend charts.

They also gave us a sneak peak of what is in the pipeline, and I for one am once again getting really excited.

One thing that caught my eye was some vNext features, for example the new build infrastructure that is going to be introduced. YES the build agent is finally going cross platform…
As per Brian Harry's post:

Sneak peek – Updated build service

I (Brian Harry) showed a preview of a major update to the VS Online/TFS build service that we’ve been working on.  We believe it will address a large portion of the suggestions to improve it that we’ve received.  Improvements include:

• A much simpler customization experience that doesn’t require XAML/Workflow – just a simple sequence of tasks to execute.
• A real time build output window to easily track the progress on your build
• Build definition versioning/auditing so you can know who changed your build definition, what changes they made and why.
• A web based editing/administration experience
• The ability to share build agents across projects and collections, making shared build pools far more viable.
• A cross platform build agent so that you can automate builds for Mac and Linux too (or even builds than span a PC, Mac and Linux).

See more exiting new from Brian's post.

Aaarrgghh; the wait…

4 Years of TFS and ALM…

In August 2014 Team Foundation Consulting celebrated its 4^th anniversary. As the only consultancy in SA focussed solely on ALM it certainly puts us in a unique position as we really service a very specific target market.

I will be the first to admit that when it all started in 2010, TFS was not as well received as it is 4 years on. Clients were apprehensive having consistent problems with Visual Source Safe and then trying to install TFS 2005 and TFS 2008. TFS 2010 slowly had clients coming around as they were finally able to get what they expected out of TFS. TFS 2012 and 2013 have made my job much, much easier.

The value that can be derived from the new versions of TFS are clear. The integration with Git, the value add of Release Management and the adoption of a much shortened release cycle for updates has seen TFS rise to the occasion…and without saying anything I can tell you that some of the VS talks and projects that we are doing at the ALM Rangers makes me really excited to see how TFS will evolve a year or 2 down the line!

To keep it short, I decided to share with you my 4 lists of 4 for our 4^th anniversary;

My 4 favourite moments so far…

1. Starting the ALM days SA event
2. Seeing the demand for our services growing year on year
3. This is a personal one but becoming a Visual Studio ALM Ranger has long been an ambition of mine… so glad to be a part of this passionate community since 2013
4. Presenting at local events…I still love to engage with those who actually use the toolset every day, even if it is just for source control

4 things I did not expect when I started Team Foundation Consulting…

1. Some of you think I work for Microsoft!
   While I do partner with MS SA to bring you so many ALM events each year, I neither “sell” their products nor am I employed by them. I am what you may call independent and free to share my own thoughts and opinions (as I occasionally tend to do…)
2. The demand for TFS training in South Africa was unexpected
   I thought consulting would be at the core of the business, but it is our on-site training that has the most demand
3. After hours and weekend upgrades
   Not all clients can have the luxury of a test environment or being able to shut down production during office hours… upgrades happen after hours – it’s a fact.
4. TFS is being used in a wide variety of industries…
   You may think that most of my clients are dev houses, but these days it seems everyone has a dev department and many of them are using TFS to manage their work. Apart from the companies who develop solutions, some of the industries I’ve done business with include; mining, banking and financial /insurance provider, law, recycling, health, government, retail systems, call centres, logistics, entertainment, aerospace/arms, food stuffs, FMCG, fashion houses, clothing and textile, vehicle tracking, tourism, online booking systems, education tertiary, credit bureaus…to mention a few.

4 sad ways TFS gets used in large companies…

1. Installed and being looked at wondering “what now?”…sad
2. 1 team out of 12 …very sad
3. Source control only …too sad
4. As a pilot project that was never completed…crying now…

4 ways TFS and VS is better now than it ever has been…

1. Features features features
2. Usability
3. Customisability
4. Reporting Mechanisms (keeping management happy)

Thank you to all my clients for their support throughout the years, I'm excited about the future!

Move from GIT to TFS Version Control

I have dealt with a couple of clients recently who were very keen to get into the GIT repo's that are available in TFS 2013. The unfortunate truth is that GIT is not the "same" as the widely used TFS Version Control (TFSVC), SVN, VSS source control systems. Some teams tend to have a problem with this and, after numerous missing changes/files and problems with branching, commit vs pushing and merging issues, will inevitably ask : "How do we go back to what we know?".

There are tools to move from VSS & SVN to TFSVC and there are instructions to move from TFVC to GIT, but what about GIT to TFSVC? Well luckily, for a simple migration, you do not need any commercial or "3rd party" tools.

You do need to get your hand on GIT-TF and optionally the git client, and you are "a" for away.

1) Clone the repository

git clone http://<<servername>>:8080/tfs/<<Project collection>>/<<team project>>/_git/<<repo name>>

2) Replace the repository bindings

git remote rm origin

git tfs configure http://<<servername>>:8080/tfs/<<Project collection>>     $/<<team project>>/<<destination folder path>>

3) Finally check in the changes

git tfs checking --deep

Remember the --deep parameter - this will replay the commits as check-ins in TFS

The only thing you should be aware of here is that the check-ins will happen in chronological order, but the time will reflect the time and date that the check-in is occurring and not when they were committed into the GIT repo.