Last Tuesday I offered our new definitive definition of scenario in MSF. Scenario in MSF is indeed short for usage scenario but those usage scenarios have nothing to do with legacy from OOSE and the requirements and analysis technique called use cases. There are no use cases in MSF. MSF does not describe procedures of interaction in the system architecture. And there are no abstract analysis concepts such as actors and the use cases they perform. MSF uses very specific, detailed definitions called personas and scenarios. I hope this helps to clear up any confusion. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF

scenario

A type of work item, describing a specific usage of the envisaged software system by a particular persona. Scenarios should be goal directed. As a persona attempts to reach a goal, the scenario records the specific steps taken in attempting to reach that goal.

This new definition is intended to underline the origins of personas and usage scenarios from the human computer interaction and user experience design community. MSF is intended as a methodology that encourages good user experience and interaction design and is founded on requirements techniques from the user experience community. Specifically, personas originate from Alan Cooper and Kim Goodwin and Usage Scenarios from the HCI department at Virginia Tech. [As an interesting footnote: Alan Cooper was the creator of Visual Basic and by incorporating some of his work on user experience and interaction we are re-connecting with an old friend.] Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF

This is me opening the proceeding in the morning with the keynote speech.

And later on the panel session with Nien Chen (NC) Liu and Peter Hu from Microsoft to my left and the panel of local experts to my right: Professor Cheng, Professor Chou and Mr. Hu (the first CMMI Lead Appraiser in Taiwan.)

A few empty seats in the front row but otherwise it was a full house at the Grand Hyatt.

As you can see better from this angle.

We got quite a few questions from the floor.

Here I am giving a press interview earlier in the week. Everything involved eating. I put on 5 lbs over the 3 week trip to Asia. So lots of biking to work for me to take it all off again, now that I'm back in Seattle. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Taipei, MSF, Microsoft, Software+Engineering

Before I share some photos of the new space, I want to be clear that MSF is still part of Visual Studio Team System. What actually happened was PnP was merged in to the VSTS team. After that was completed it made natural sense to move MSF in to the PnP team. I joked that we were putting all the non-revenue generating things together in one bucket but actually what we did is put all the practices and guidance and methodology things together in one team in the one collaborative space.

As part of the reorganization, Steve Elston takes over as the Group Manager for MSF and Sanjeev Garg is our new Program Manager. There is a slightly modified role for Randy Miller who becomes the Product Planner for MSF. Meanwhile, my title was changed to Process Architect.

I'm also incredibly excited to announce that Alan Wills has joined the team as Software Architect. Alan has a strong background in methodology with his work on Catalysis with Desmond D'Sousa in the 1990's. Adding Alan adds some significant intellectual horsepower to our team.

Mean while we have collocated the team in one of the flexible collaboration work spaces in building 5. Finally, the MSF team gets to be agile. This will greatly enhance our productivity and quality and I'm very excited about our next release of MSF - which is being targeted to coincide with the launch of the Database Professional version of VSTS (sorry, I won't talk about dates ;-) ).

Here are a few pictures of the new flexible work space in building 5. It's a PnP experiment to show how Microsoft can build a work environment for agility and agile practices.

This is the entrance to the wing of building 5 where the new space has been built.

This open collaborative space is mostly reserved as "hot" or "jump" stations for contractors and visiting staff.

This is my new office. The offices are smaller than traditional Microsoft personal offices. However, they have sliding doors to save space. They also have glass walls and doors to let light through in to the central collaborative working spaces.

Notice in this second one, how the walls can move.

And here is one of those. The space can actually be configured in to different sized rooms. This is one of the larger ones.

And here is another one. Note the different layout in the room.

The tables are designed to take two flat panel monitors using these flexible brackets.

Many of the walls are glass to allow light to penetrate deep in to the building. Some of these are opaque and double as whiteboards.

There are also some small rooms for private meetings, conference calls and brainstorming sessions.

We also have a social area with a big screen - ideal for watching World Cup Soccer games.

The collaboration spaces have sliding glass doors again to save space and allow light in to the room. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSFT, Microsoft, Patterns+Practices, MSF

I would consider this book to be about the "next generation" of agile development. It has some things in it that pioneering agilists might reject as not agile enough. It's realistic enough for the current times of scaling to larger enterprises and programs and architectures, while still able to meet the demands of CMMI and the needs of regulatory compliance (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley). And, it does so by establishing the proper mind-set and an environment where the process and tools serve the practitioners instead of making them jump through hoops for the sake of process or metrics. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF, Sam+Guckenheimer, Brad+Appleton

(1) I start by asking the business owners to sketch the flow of work using stick figures and little stacks of work to be processed. I get them to map the flow with arrows between stations and activities for the stick figures scribbled on to a white board

(2) I then make a statechart model in Visio and create a state for each station in the flow - typically identified by a stick figure performing an activity. I then create a state for each queue in front of each station.

(3) I then map all the possible transitions between states. Remembering to think about return transitions. "Ooops, I didn't mean to close that, I need to re-open it."

(4) I then ask for all the reasons that each transition can happen. This activity usually flushes out a few missing transitions and even an occasional missing state. So I then rework steps 2 and 3 and complete the reasons

(5) I then transcribe the Visio statechart in to the WITD XML using an XML editor. It is a good idea to start with the WITDs that are shipped with MSF and edit them.

We're not done at that point.

(6) Next we need to identify all the data fields required and a form layout for those fields. We need to decide which of the fields will be used in reports.

(7) Now using the XML editor we add these to the WITD file.

(8) Now we need to go through each transition and identify required fields that must be completed as a pre-requisite for that transition.

(9) Finally we edit the subtle aspects of the WITD file to include the required fields for specific transitions.

We'll be posting some white papers on customization of MSF process templates very soon now and I will alert you when they are on-line. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF, Vistual+Studio

Meanwhile, Michael Kropp, the General Manager of Patterns and Practices (also known as PAG, the part of MSFT that Ward Cunnigham used to work for) has taken over as the Product Unit Manager for Team Architect. He brought Patterns and Practices with him. MSF is now part of Patterns and Practices with Rick Maguire as the new manager.

I'm fantastically excited about this news and what it might mean for the future of MSF and Microsoft's software engineering tools and process. MSF process guidance delivers the Who, What, When, Where, and Why of software process activities, while Patterns and Practices and their guidance and source code offerings deliver the How. Puting us together with them rounds out our offering and working under the same boss makes it so much easier. When you add these possibilities to the already exciting material coming from Team Architect including Domain Specific Langauges (DSL) and Software Factories (SFx) then we are well on our way to delivering on my dream of a whole new, better, more productive, higher quality, way to build software. I really feel we are set up for success with this new management structure and I'm hugely excited to be part of it. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Microsoft, Patterns+Practices, Software+Factories, Domain+Specific+Languages, DSL, Model+Driven+Development, MDD