Wednesday, April 26, 2006

New MSF Landscape

There have been some management and organization changes that affect the MSF team at Microsoft. Recently our boss, Julia Liuson was asked to move over and run the Visual Basic Product Unit. Congratulations Julia on this move!

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

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Agile Van Postscript

Last night I was up in Canada speaking to an enthusiastic Agile Vancouver crowd in a packed room at Sierra Systems in downtown Vancouver, BC. I gave two talks - my “Who’s Managing Lunch - and other Parables of Lean Project Management” presentation that I’m turning in to my next book and my “FDD 101” talk. Despite having to sit through two hours of me with a 15 minute break, the audience stayed until the end. I’d like to thank Philippe Kruchten for inviting me and to the excellent hospitality from the entire group. It was nice to have them pick up the tab for my hotel and not to have to drive back to Seattle Monday night. I’m taking an unusual step and making my FDD powerpoint slides available in PPT format. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Feature+Driven+Development, FDD, Philippe+Kruchten

[Download Feature Driven Development by David J. Anderson in PPT format]

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Executive Briefing Center is No.1

This is a picture of the notepad that Steve Ballmer didn’t use during the visit of President Hu Jintao of China at Microsoft last week.

How did I come to own it?

Well one of the cool things I get to do at Microsoft is present at executive briefings. These events take place at the Executive Briefing Center (EBC) on the Redmond campus where executive from visiting customer firms are entertained and briefed on new Microsoft products and services. I’m one of around 250 regular presenters. This year the EBC won a set of awards from the Association of Briefing Program Managers including the premier award for Briefing Program of the Year. To celebrate the award the EBC held a party on Friday evening. At the party there was a fun little quiz and the prizes were notepads left over from the visit of President Hu. I won Steve B’s notepad. [And before anyone asks, “it is not for sale.”]

The glass trophies awarded at the ABPM awards held in Boston earlier in April.

And the cake we all shared. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Association+Briefing+Program+Managers, Microsoft, Hu+Jintao

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

FDD at the CM Crossroads

Brad Appleton continues to gently push Feature Driven Development as a strong contributor to the body of knowledge on agile software development. I agree there are a lot of lessons we can learn about methodology going forward that FDD captured and experimented with 8 years ago. Brad’s latest piece in CM Crossroads gives a full overview of FDD with some insight on how much configuration management was build in to the process from the beginning. This was no accident because the Singapore project had a truly World class CM guy in charge - Terry Gliedt.

Brad also adds his thoughts on code-ownership in FDD in another article at CM Crossroads - Situational Code Ownership: Dynamically Balancing Individual vs Collective Ownership. I’ve written about this topic before in The Coad Letter: The Case for Class Ownership, archived here. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Feature+Driven+Development, FDD, Brad+Appleton

Friday, April 14, 2006

VSTS Trials

We gave out some software at the CMMI Appraisers workshop we ran at the SEPG conference recently. Some people have had some problems with it as it requires some other downloads. For those who attended the event here is the latest update on publicly available trials of the product…

We have recently made available for download to all customers the trial editions of Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server and SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition. Previously, these trials were only available to MSDN Subscribers. If you’re currently running on Team Foundation Server RC (which you may have received at SEPG in Nashville), you may want to upgrade to the trial of the final release version. The trials are available for download here:

Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Trial

SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition Evaluation