Colin Bird









Brains are Machines Series: Blog 1: Shifting Sands

Original post: http://businessvalueexchange.com/brains-are-machines-series-blog-1-shifting-sands/ The industrial revolution saw the landscape of Britain transformed from rural & agricultural to ur...


17 / 5 / 2013 by Steve Garnett

HP Business Value Exchange–Thought Leadership & Featured Contributions

  I’ve been invited to become a CIO Thought Leader and Featured Contributor on a new IDG produced site in collaboration with HP Enterprise Services. The site is called The Business Value Excha...


10 / 5 / 2013 by Steve Garnett

Agile, documentation and visual aids for the developer

My reason for looking into this particular subject was being on a client site and sitting with a BA who was feeling a bit down hearted. She couldn’t figure out how she could properly communicate to t...


2 / 5 / 2013 by Rory Street

Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2012–Do it right!

Are you using TFS 2012?  Are you using or adopting Scrum? Then get the most out of your tools and your process by attending a 2-day Certified ScrumMaster course with a free one day Scrum w...


1 / 5 / 2013 by Richard Erwin

21st Century Corporate Structure

The Cellular Business Model Business in the 21st century is fast-paced, our tools are the internet, the knowledge worker, internationalisation, globalisation, the PC, the cloud, digital communicatio...


1 / 5 / 2013 by Steve Garnett

No to Evangelism, yes to Education

I've often heard Agilists referred to as Evangelists, and it's always rankled with me. Lately I've been wondering why that is, and this is what I came up with. It's hard to talk about Evangelism w...


29 / 4 / 2013 by Dan Brown

The playback engine could not find the selenium binaries

I was putting together a demo of cross browser Coded UI testing with Visual Studio 2012 and ran into a minor problem.  Hopefully this post will save you some time. I grabbed the very helpful V...


25 / 4 / 2013 by Richard Erwin

Behind the scenes of Microsoft Tech.Days 2013

Yesterday I presented at Microsoft Tech.Days Online 2013.  It was a slightly odd experience presenting in an almost empty auditorium to some cameras and a bunch of AV guys. *Picture shamele...


25 / 4 / 2013 by Richard Erwin

PSAKE Incubator

A while a go I wrote an article on how I managed to get the test results from a build that was using PSAKE to surface in TFS’s summary view. I provided one solution to this problem in that article th...


23 / 4 / 2013 by Rory Street

Tech.Days Online 2013

It’s my pleasure to be part of Microsoft UK Tech Days Online 2013 which is happening next Wednesday (24th April 2013).  It’s shaping up to be an excellent 3-day online event for both developers ...


19 / 4 / 2013 by Richard Erwin

Agile:MK Journal “Writing Good Requirements”

The Agile:MK Journal, Issue 04 March edition is available from www.agilemk.com. This edition is a write-up of the March User Group session was a discussion about Writing Good Requirements. ...


17 / 4 / 2013 by Steve Garnett

Cross Functional Teams, Not People

A common thing I hear in new agile adoptions is the concept of making the team Cross Functional. That is, the team should have all of the skills necessary to complete the work being undertaken. Ho...


10 / 4 / 2013 by Dan Brown

Upgrading to Visual Studio 2012 - Error MSB4018: The "SqlBuildTask" task failed unexpectedly

Working on a customer project which is an upgrade of Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2005 projects up to the latest Visual Studio bits and pieces. Upgrade of most solutions went fine, except for ...


2 / 4 / 2013 by Stuart Preston

TeamFoundationApplication and TeamFoundationApplicationCore

If like me you’ve written code that makes use of Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server you may also have made use of Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server.TeamFoundationApplication. This is t...


26 / 3 / 2013 by Rory Street

We have a choice of viewpoints

I adore working with teams and seeing them pull together, be creative and succeed against the challenges they face. However, quite often the challenges are human-centric rather than what they’re work...


24 / 3 / 2013 by Sophie Manton

A Decade in Agile: 3. How Adopting Agile Increases Business Benefits

This blog is part of the Blog Series: A Decade in Agile and was first published in February 2005. My updated reflections are in blue italics. I believe that adopting a scrum approach to project del...


19 / 3 / 2013 by Steve Garnett

Branches : Less is probably more; but efficiency definitely is.

Technorati Tags: TFS Branches,Branches,Peter Haynes Technorati Tags: ALM Technorati Tags: TFS2012   I don’t want to get into the whys and wherefores just yet; I’d like to start with the ass...


12 / 3 / 2013 by Peter Haynes

Agile:MK Journal Issue 3–February 2013 Available

www.agilemk.com Latest issues of Agile:MK Journal available. Next Meeting: Tuesday 26th March, 6pm-8pm, Jurys Inn Hotel, Midsummer Boulevard, Milton Keynes ...


11 / 3 / 2013 by Steve Garnett

Reports–Multiple collections one warehouse; use WorkItemBK GUID for joins.

  Introduction In many organisations a TFS installation will comprise of more than one project collection. The data from all project collections is stored in the same TFS warehouse. This i...


11 / 3 / 2013 by Peter Haynes

Reports – How to create a Day by Day based SQL Report

  Introduction This is a description of how to put together a report that tracks change to some data over time. This example will be a basic Product Backlog report. For this work we will...


8 / 3 / 2013 by Peter Haynes

Technical Debt: Strategies & Tactics for Avoiding & Removing it

For clarity, this blog will focus on how to manage technical debt i.e. make it visible, communicate it, quantify it, and prioritise its removal. This is because  in my experience it is not only ...


5 / 3 / 2013 by Steve Garnett

Is it all a big sprint?

If you know me, you'll know I'm a fan of both Scrum and Kanban, and get irritated by those who see them as opposing forces. So this post is definitely not me having a pop at scrum. However I do have ...


27 / 2 / 2013 by Dan Brown

TFSJobAgent Error–An item with the same key has already been added

I’ve posted this more as a reminder to myself next time I create TFSJobAgent plugins. If you ever encounter the error below when adding a new TFSJobAgent plugin: TF53010: The following error ...


27 / 2 / 2013 by Rory Street

New Tools for TFS Administrators in TFS 2012

There are some really useful new tools for administrators in TFS 2012, I’ve only just seen this now on Grant Holliday's blog but you can now do things such as look at the TFS Activity Log and one of ...


25 / 2 / 2013 by Rory Street

Agile:MK Journal Issue 02 Available

RippleRock are sponsoring the February Agile User Group in Milton Keynes. Monday 25th February, 6pm-8pm, Jurys Inn Hotel, Midsummer Boulevard, Milton Keynes. Theme: “Getting the Business Involved...


11 / 2 / 2013 by Steve Garnett

Portfolio prioritising–a simple approach that works

Portfolio-level prioritising is fraught with problems… ambitious senior stakeholders, promoting their agenda, rarely meeting together to see how their projects compare to others resulting in a portfo...


8 / 2 / 2013 by Bazil Arden

TFS will host Git Repositories

If you haven’t see in it already, check it out here. TFS will host Git Repositories (100% compatible), see Brian Harry’s blog for more details and links to tutorials. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry...


1 / 2 / 2013 by Rory Street

A Decade in Agile: 2. CIO/IT Directors–What Agile Means to You

This blog is part of the Blog Series: A Decade in Agile and was first published in April 2010. My updated reflections are in blue italics. Agile is a double-edged sword! On the one hand, following...


31 / 1 / 2013 by Steve Garnett

Programmatically getting a list of PBIs from a merge between two branches in TFS

TFS has some pretty powerful functionality out of the box one of them is the merge functionality. However I’ve always felt it missed what I thought was a rather nice feature to have, and that is the ...


29 / 1 / 2013 by Rory Street

Using TFS with the WorkflowCentralLogger, PowerShell and PSAKE

I was recently brought into a client site where they had made use of PSAKE to handle their build process. The build would be kicked off from the traditional Workflow in TFS using an Invoke Process. E...


28 / 1 / 2013 by Rory Street

A Decade in Agile: 1. Breaking the Iron Triangle–Project Manager v Scrum Master

This blog was first published in February 2005. My retrospective comments are in blue italics. As a PM my general approach to initiating projects has been to build a Project Initiation Document (PI...


23 / 1 / 2013 by Steve Garnett

Blog Series: A Decade in Agile

10 years… Ten whole years of my working life dedicated to creating software through agile methods. A lot of things have changed since those first few sprints. Lots of lessons learned, (usually the ...


23 / 1 / 2013 by Steve Garnett

Finish 'One Small Step' at a time

How did we get to the moon - Part 2 Here's a daft question, which mission first landed humans on the moon? Apollo 11 of course, but lets think about that. It wasn't Apollo 1, it was Apollo 11. What ...


16 / 1 / 2013 by Dan Brown

How did we get to the moon - Part 1

With the BBC going all Stargazing LiveI thought I would start this blog by sharing some of my space based Agile and Kanban thoughts. Being an amateur astronomer, and someone who naturally seeks out m...


9 / 1 / 2013 by Dan Brown

Visualising Agile: Focus generates money and learning…

The simplest illustration of the benefits of focus must be this one – clearly illustrating that if we focus on _and finish_ one feature (or project) at a time then all 3 features are delivered quicke...


23 / 11 / 2012 by Bazil Arden

Multiple Teams with Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012 & Visual Studio Scrum V2.x (Updated 14/5/2013)

  Introducing Team Foundation Server 2012 and Scrum V2.x The combination of Microsoft’s latest Scrum process template and Team Foundation Server 2012 brings a host of new features and much im...


19 / 11 / 2012 by Colin Bird

Visualising Agile: a Risk Reduction Recipe for the Contractually Minded

Many turn to contracts as a way to reduce risk. Agile has several alternative, and proven, was to reduce risk. This blog outlines shows how to get from a contract to an ordered list of clear requirem...


9 / 11 / 2012 by Bazil Arden

Visualising Agile: Balancing the pipeline

The delivery pipeline is an idea which resonates with our clients. The simplicity of the metaphor and the truths that it reveals make it a compelling message to share with others in the organisation....


1 / 11 / 2012 by Bazil Arden

MTM setting Internet Proxy stopping Internet connection

At a current client, there have been incidents where the running of an MTM Test manually changes the IE proxy settings, which means no more Google juice and no email – as they are running Office 365....


18 / 7 / 2012 by Simon Reindl

TFS #loc.MinimumNetFXVersion and Windows 2012 0x0000005D

A tale of two error in the path to RC install. I wanted to install the RC of TFS2012 to do some upgrade proving. To  keep up to date the target is Windows Server 2012, running SQL 2012, and TF...


3 / 7 / 2012 by Simon Reindl

Release Planning in Scrum

Overview There is a common misconception that there is no planning in Scrum. While there is nothing in the latest Scrum Guide (http://www.scrum.org/scrumguides/) specifying Release Planning, the omi...


13 / 6 / 2012 by Simon Reindl

Organisational WIP: too many projects hurt throughput

The performance of software delivery teams is so often undermined by team members being shared with other teams or regularly borrowed for operational support and other emergencies. We know that sma...


31 / 5 / 2012 by Colin Bird