Microsoft Development on the Prairie

Greetings!  My name is Dave Froslie and I’m a Development Lead on the Microsoft Business Framework (MBF) team in Fargo, ND.  MBF’s goal in life is to be ‘the enabling technology of choice for creating and customizing business solutions’.  Our team is part of the Visual Studio team and is targeting a ship date in the 2006-2007 timeframe.

Did you catch the part where I said my team is based in Fargo, ND?  You may not have known about the Microsoft outpost in Fargo.  It was created when Microsoft bought Great Plains Software in 2001 and there are about 1000 employees here, including several development teams.  MBF development is actually split across three sites – Fargo, Copenhagen (former Navision site), and Redmond.

Much of what I plan to write about in this blog will pertain to development process, with Scrum (https://www.controlchaos.com) being the most common topic.  I’ve been using Scrum practices for 5+ years and we’ve been using it across the MBF-Fargo subsystem teams for the past year.  With every implementation of Scrum, you have to experiment to determine what makes the most sense for your situation – all the while keeping in the spirit of Scrum and Agile principles.  I plan to write about what we’ve tried and what has worked for us in our multi-team implementation for MBF-Fargo, with the hope that others can leverage this knowledge.  In turn, I hope to learn some things from those of you reading this blog.

Beyond Scrum, I expect to write some about MBF, multi-site development, and maybe even a little bit about life on the prairie in Fargo.  Please stay tuned…