Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices

Distributed development is a fact of life for many teams. Unfortunately most agile methodologies or approaches assume that the team is located in a single team room. Until recently there has been little guidance about how to apply these approaches with a geographically dispersed team.

Microsoft’s patterns & practices group has been following an agile, distributed development approach for the past five years. During this time teams within the group have experimented extensively with different approaches to best address the challenges of distributed agile development. This paper outlines the challenges faced by geographically distributed agile teams and details some proven practices to address these issues and build successful distributed teams.

There's also an Agile Development Showcase portal inside MSDN that provides even more great guidance around agile development.

Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/ to see the full line of existing patterns & practices guidance.

Here are the details on some great community events coming to us in December:

Kansas City Day of .NET

December 6th, Leawood, KS

The Kansas City .Net User Group will be hosting a Day of .NET on Saturday, December 6th from 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. It will be held at the Centriq Training Center in Leawood, KS (map). The day's training will consist of three main tracks, Developer, Architect and SharePoint.  Feel free to mix and match, attend half a session, or whatever suits you. Breakfast and Lunch will be provided during the day, and door prizes will be awarded following the last session. The cost of a day of .NET training? Absolutely FREE. The entire cost of the day will be covered by our sponsors.

Register for the event today!

St. Louis Day of .NET

December 13th, Clayton, MO

The St. Louis .NET User Group is hosting their first annual St. Louis' Day of .NET, a one day technical conference being held on Saturday, December 13th from 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. at the West Campus of Washington University and providing over 20 technical sessions including these hot .NET topics:

Microsoft Windows 7

Silverlight

SharePoint

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

Distributed Caching using Microsoft "Velocity"

The future of C# and VB.NET

Microsoft's New Cloud Computing Technologies

SQL Server 2008

For a complete list of currently scheduled sessions, please click here.

In addition to the great sessions by some of the areas leading presenters, attendees will have the opportunity to win one of many great prizes provided by Microsoft and many of the other conference sponsors. Don't miss this opportunity to attend and network with your peers and coworkers while staying abreast of the most cutting edge technologies during a time of rapid change.

Registration is $40 ($50 after Dec 1st and all registrations must be recieved by Dec 7th).

Systems Thinking - Managing Complexity and Chaos by Jamshid Gharajedaghi

This book is a cornucopia of ideas, patterns, and solutions for looking at complex systems and creating order and structure throughout them. It's a book about organizing businesses and people but applies equally well to software systems, especially those built through domain driven design principles. It's a dense read but full if mind-blowing concepts. It's is a business book but I'm classifying it as a architecture and design book for one good reason - it has the best description of architecture that I've ever encountered.

Here's how he describes it:

 Architecture is a general description of a system. It identifies its vital functions, major elements and their relationships, and the organizational processes that define the nature of the whole. An architecture consists of a set of distinct but interrelated platforms (views). Each platform (view) represents a dimension of the system signifying a unique context, output, and mode of behavior controlled by a predefined set of performance criteria and measures. These dimensions and their complementary processes are individually necessary and collectively sufficient to give rise to a viable system capable of realizing its desired specifications.

I could do an entire talk on this definition. Architecture boils down to two things: 1) determining the minimal but necessary set of views you need to define the design of a system (e.g. logical, physical, deployment) and 2) designing the system in question through models for each of those views.

Leadership and people skills are the focus for this upcoming quarter's ArcReady tour.

Professional Patterns on the Job

You're smart. You deliver. What more could your company want from you?  Why don’t they come to you for the big technical decisions? Why won’t they listen to your proposals? It seems like everyone has an agenda and they’re doing everything they can to kill your great ideas.

Join us this quarter as we focus on the soft skills that architects need to master. Learning these skills will boost your emotional intelligence and help you become a more professional, well rounded contributor. You’ll gain insight into the architect’s role as leader, influencer, and business professional and learn how to leverage your position to become a positive force within your organization.

Session 1: Mastering the Soft Skills
In this session, we’ll discuss key interpersonal skills and how they can affect your projects and career. We cover how to positively connect with humans, how to participate in and influence the business processes you support, and how to transcend your technical role and maximize your connections with all members of your organization.

Session 2: Organizational Dynamics
This session examines the dynamic nature of large organizations – their structures, decision making processes, and political landscapes. We’ll discuss the goals of key business and technical decision makers and their influence on architects and software projects. We’ll conclude with some strategies for maximizing the soft skills from Session 1 to ensure successful outcomes for your projects and career.

Please register using the links below and join us for this great event:

Nov 4    Omaha, NE 

Nov 6    West Des Moines, IA

Nov 12  St. Louis, MO

Nov 13  Overland Park, KS

Nov 20  Minneapolis, MN

Some cool new things on the net to share:

A poem about architects (translated from French). How sweet. Written by Philippe Kruchten of "4+1 Views of Architecture" fame.

IASA IT Architect Skills Library

One way to approach your career goals is assess your current skill level and build a career roadmap to round out your overall skill set. A good place to start is the IASA skills library. Here's an overview of the skill sets that architects should posses. IASA has also compiled a list the individual skills within those skill sets. I recommend picking some that you are interested in and find ways to gain mastery - formal training, role change, new or more challenging projects, etc.

This is an online knowledge base for architects designing high scalability websites. It features links to case studies of all the big sites: YouTube, Google, Flickr, Amazon, and more. Invaluable resource if you need ideas on how to scale. Thanks to my buddy Ken Sipe for pointing this one out to me.

Microsoft StyleCop

For those of you who do code reviews, this one should come in handy. Think of it as FxCop for code style and formatting. It analyzes C# source code to enforce style and consistency rules. Can be run from inside Visual Studio or via MSBuild.

Search twitter for particular keywords and this app will determine how many people are tweeting about it and whether they saying things that are positive, neutral, or negative. A love little innovations like this.

Awesome tool to build beautiful word clouds from a block of text. Here's an example taken from this blog posting.