Happy New Year 2013

Happy New Year wishes  2013......

Hope all the best comes in 2013.....

Agile Scrum International Summit in India

Agile Scrum International Summit to be held in Bangalore, India for the Very First Time.

I take pride in being the Co-Chair for this Event.

http://scrumindia.in/

keep watching this space for more details on this event...

,,,
Senthil

High Traffic Keywords to my blog !

Hello ,

Today was checking the most traffic to my blog based on the keywords.

spending sometime to know how the traffic comes in to my blog.

The readers come in to my blog by the below mentioned key workd searches!

1. ms build missing reference

2. devenv.exe/installvstemplates - Missing the templates?

3. IIS7 Settings for WCF hosting

4. "Distributed Scrum" Practices

5. Silverlight :Expander within AccordianItem with a theme Applied: sys.InvalidOperationException : AG_E_UNKOWN_ERROR

Will keep adding my Thoughts on Agile , SCRUM, KANBAN, Management Practices soon!

Thanks

Senthil

Effective "Distributed Scrum" Practices

When it comes to Distributed Scrum, the Agile Teams can be located in more than one location.

Some of the Agile Teams are also planned in 3 locations based on the nature of the Business.
Majority of the Teams are Designed as:Onsite & Offshore teams, there are also other Business Models where in we have a Combination of: Onsite, Offsite, & and also a Near Shore.
Below are few of the best Practises which will help when dealing with Distributed Scrum Teams.

1. Active colloboration Between Distributed Teams:
a. Daily stand up Meeting.
The time can be decided by your teams as per your project schedules.
If you are Having a offshore Team in India and a Onsite team in US or Europe , fix the Right Timing.
During the stand up meeting an Online Compuer Screen needs to be shared between two teams, where the Time Reduced or the Impediments are noted down.
Or if u have a SIMPLE WALL - Maintain the Post-Its Movements with a LIVE WEB CAM.
b. Pairing of Onsite and Offshore Team members:
Pairing is one of the best effetive ways to complete a User Story.
To get started, the SAME user story can be shared by 2 team members - 1 in onsite and other in Offshore.
Also Pair Programming Between the Onsite and Offshore can be done by a Shared Desk Top.

c. Team Members Available in Comminicators or Other Messengers:
All the Agile Team members need to be in the common Messenger- Ex: MS Communicator, Skype , or others.
Creation of Project Chat Groups.MS Communicator , Skype haave the facility of creating project groups and the members dicussions on those chat groups.

d. Online Tools: for Story Tracking: virtual story-task board.

The onsite and Offshore Team members to have a virtual task board if possible.

A Simple WALL in Onsite with Great Colloborations will do for most of the projects, but the wall will be more visible only to the OnSite teams.
WIKI: for User story descriptions, Arch Diagrams uploading , functional specs , team info , contant numbers, project related info getting added will help a lot.
f. Time Difference & Over Lapping between Agile Teams:

Select the BEST Timings for Overlap between the distributed teams.
2. Distributed Sprint Planning:
a. When it comes to Sprint Planning involve both the teams to-gether.
b. Do not get only the estimations from only one team, get from both the teams.-- THIS WILL HELP IN THE OWNERSHIP OF THE TASKS TAKEN UP.
3. Continuous Builds, Continuos Test Automation , Big Visible Cruises : or Big Visible Information Emittors on Either sides:
a. if you are planning for a CI System in place , there needs to be a Information Emittors in OnSite as well as on the Offshore.Ex: Cruise Control, TFS, Hudson, Team City. etc.,
b. Also the Test's Passed \ Failed info should be configured on the CI topology.
c. Sprint Burn downs and product burndown based on User Stories to be available on a SEPARATE MONITOR for both the teams.
4. During Demo:
a. During Sprint Demo's if both the teams are present they all can Hear the VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER!
5.Web Cams: Having Web Cams in both the ends will be a great tool for colloboration.

Thanks
Senthil

Back Again.....

Hello,
I was quite a bit not concentrating on my this blog in the past few months....

i had started another blog named: http://xtremeagile.blogspot.com/

i shall soon be adding more Agile - Scrum Contents in this Blog!

Now a Certified Scrum Master

Recently went Though the Certified Scrum Master Course and took up the Exam as well..

Now a Certified Scrum Master!!!

Silverlight :Expander within AccordianItem with a theme Applied: sys.InvalidOperationException : AG_E_UNKOWN_ERROR

my team was working in a XAML where we need to add themes to a accordian items when there was Expander controls within the accordian..

whenever we applied themes to this partucular xaml we came across an err like :

sys.InvalidOperationException : AG_E_UNKOWN_ERR

Initially i thoughought this was a Silverlight 2.0 errr....but then started to see why this err occurs and jumped in to my task getting to the core of the xaml, removing controls one by one untill the issue was kicked off...

1. removed most of the controls in the xaml, and holded only the err prone controls.
2. removed the themes first - it worked.
3. added themes - err reproduced.

then thought of havinng the round abouts of making the controls invisible in the XAML And then make them visible during the run time in the C# code.

I drilled down and saw that Expanders inside the accordian got the errs when themes were applied.

i made the expander Visibility="Collapsed" and then in code behind made the visibility of the expanders

Now the err was not appearing ....this is one way of approach to remove errrs when we apply themes for expanders inside the accoridians in Silverlight

,,,
Senthil

ms build missing reference

After my previous post of adding the explict declaration of the project dependencies ,there was one instance where the same problem was existing.

So this tiime i manually removed the reference of the dll, and then added again...it workd in all instances after this step.


So 2 ways here:
1. Either manually removing the dll ref's and adding again.
2. giveing the explicit declaration in the sln file as like the previous post will help!

Thanks
Senthil

msbuild missing reference ,msbuild wrong build order

MSbuild incorrect Build order ?

MSbuild reference missing Dll's ?

when we come across these kind of situations , the probable reason could be that the build order in VS2008 is different from the build oder which msbuild uses.

VS uses a build order and passes the same to msbuild. BUt when u directly call msbuild to build, there could be difference in the build order of the projects.

To over come the missing references in Msbuild and Build order add the below section to the *.sln file.
ProjectSection(ProjectDependencies) = postProject section

ex:

if there is Project B which is referecning Project A , and if Project B gets built without A then add the below :


Project("{8BC9CEB8-8B4A-11D0-8D11-00A0C91BC942}") = "projA", "ProjA.vsproj", "{AAAAAA-F34D-430J-7C4-12343545G}"
EndProject

Project("{9BK9CEB8-123B-11DP-(8JU9-8989VC91BNJUI}") = "projB", "projB.vsproj", "{XY7HJ3D1-E2JU-41G7-HUA6-1E2556YUIA26}"
ProjectSection(ProjectDependencies) = postProject
{AAAAAA-F34D-430J-7C4-12343545G} = {AAAAAA-F34D-430J-7C4-12343545G}
EndProjectSection
EndProject