Steve’s Monthly Newsletter – December 2011

I receive a lot of email each week from you asking very specific, and valuable questions. It’s my hope that a newsletter like this will help me communicate important announcements, tips/tricks, and other items to help you and your team ultimately be more successful!

Announcements

Happy Holidays to everyone!  I hope you all take the time to enjoy the season with your family and friends (assuming the build doesn’t break!).  For those of you local to Colorado, I hope to see you soon and share a holiday toast!

If you haven’t joined me before, I encourage you to stop by my virtual office hours!  I’m committed to holding them through the end of January.  If enough folks visit I’d like to extend them until summer.  My remaining hours for this month:

• 12/15 @ 9:30 AM (Pacific)
• 12/30 @ 9:30 AM (Pacific)

Don’t forget that my team has access to programs (and funds to help pay for them) to help you and your organization get ramped up on all sorts of topics and technologies:

• TFS Deployment Planning Services
• Productive adoption of Microsoft’s ALM Platform – ALM Catalyst
• InnerWorkings
• ALM Catalyst

Send me a note and let’s see where I can help!

Upcoming Events

• December 12, 2011 - Webcast: Testing with SharePoint Projects
• December 13, 2011 - Webcast: Using Lab Management with SharePoint Development
• December 13, 2011 – Live Event: Fremont, CA: Doing Application Lifecycle Management Right
• December 14, 2011 – Live Event: Bellevue, WA: Doing Application Lifecycle Management Right
• December 15, 2011 – Live Event: Portland, OR: Doing Application Lifecycle Management Right
• December 20, 2011 - Webcast: Automated Load and UI Testing for SharePoint Projects

QuickAnswers

• Looking for a way to track effort against fixing a bug?  Instead of customizing the bug to capture hours, why not create a linked task to track it?  This simplifies the process and provides better granularity for measuring scope and effort (plus the reports are ready to run against tasks already!)
• When upgrading TFS, don’t try to do too much at one time.  Rather than moving hardware, changing domains, AND upgrading at the same time, do each one incrementally.  This will allow you to checkpoint your progress and make for easier troubleshooting should something go wrong.
• Try Notion Timesheet as a way to keep track of hours worked on a given work item in TFS.

Parting Thought

The source of Control is not the same as source control!  Oh, and True never fails!