Community | TeamSolutions

TeamSpec now supports TFS 2010 and Word 2010!

Joe Buys — Wed, 26 May 2010 22:47:00 GMT

I can't even count the number of emails I have received over the past four months asking one of two questions...

"Do you have a version of TeamSpec that works with TFS 2010 RTM?"

"Does TeamSpec support Word 2010?"

I suppose I could try and count up all the times I have got a voicemail, email, blog posting response, or even a letter in the mail! However interesting the results would be, I simply have better things to do -- such as write this posting, officially announcing support for Team Foundation Server 2010 and Microsoft Word 2010!

Here are some of the great new features:

Support for Microsoft Team Foundation Client 2010
Support for Microsoft Word 2010
Significant stability improvements for associate and skins
Other bug fixes.

Download a free trial version today from here: http://www.teamsystemsolutions.com/teamspec/download.aspx

TeamLook with Support for TFS 2010! Released

Joe Buys — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:32:00 GMT

It has been a long time in the making, but TeamLook with support for TFS 2010 has finally been released! Here are some of the highlights...

1. Full TFS 2010 (RTM) Support
2. New Query Manager with new query types support
3. Manage TFS Queries from Outlook view (via Right-Click)
4. Offline view for Work Items
5. Work Item Templates support - Allows populating common fields for new work items quicker.
6. Reading pane support for Queries and Work Items
7. Many other fixes and features!

Full TFS 2010 (RTM) Support

Directly from the screenshot below, you can see that we support the new Query Folders and Sub Queries. We also now support hierarchical work items just as Visual Studio does - directly within the query window. You can view your work items, and sub work items using the familiar method that VS uses.

New Query Manager with new query types support

We have completely redone the Query Manager. To add or edit queries, you simply do the logical thing in the query list... Right-Click on them! This will allow you to create queries, edit queries, or delete them. Once you have the query opened, you'll see that it is very familiar and similar to VS. Welcome to the new Query Manager -- its much improved, yet very familiar!

Offline view for Work Items

When you run a query, TeamLook stores all the information about that query that you normally see on the website. We keep this around so that you can use Desktop search to find those work items later. Further, since we download all this informatino about the work items, you can review them when you don't even have a connection to your TFS server!

Work Item Templates Support

Previously only available in the TFS Power Tools, the templates allowed you to easily set "default" values for work item fields so that creating a bunch of work items wasn't so repetative. We have pulled this feature into TeamLook (and Outlook), so that creating work items through office is even easier.

With all these great new features in the new TeamLook v3, don't be the last one to upgrade!

Install Issues with TeamSpec and TFS 2010 RC

Joe Buys — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:45:00 GMT

Over the last few weeks we have received very positive feedback from the community regarding TeamSpec support for TFS 2010. Unfortunately, there have been some complaints that users cannot get TeamSpec to work on their system. I'll try to address some of those common issues here in this posting.

The latest version of TeamSpec (v2.7.205) is built for Word 2007/2010 and TFS 2008/2010 RC. We made the difficult decision to not support older Beta versions of TFS because we would rather spend that time smashing the last remaining bugs and working on the killer new features expected in the next version. Building installers is not trivial work, and we are saving that time to focus on the important things instead of getting bogged down in supporting products that will be mostly useless come April 12 -- Once VS 2010 RTM is released all the betas and RC's will not need to be supported.

Additionally, we are getting reports that people with VS 2010 RC installed (which includes the TFS 2010 RC binaries) are seeing the following error:

This error "The expected element 'addIn' was not found in the XML" is because the Microsoft Office Developer Tools were not installed. During installation of VS 2010 RC, you are given a choice to install 'Complete' or 'Custom'. Choosing 'Complete' automatically installs the Office Developer Tools. However, choosing the 'Custom' install, the Office Developer Tools are not selected by default. See the following screenshot:

The Microsoft Office Developer Tools (x86) are required to make new Office Addins run properly. They install the latest version of the binaries that support office addins developed with VS 2010.

Once we publish the official build for TFS 2010 RTM, these two scenarios will be much more seamless for people installing TeamSpec!

TeamLook with Support for TFS 2010 - Features Video

Joe Buys — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:04:00 GMT

There have been many requests asking for support of TeamLook with TFS 2010. We have listened to the requests, and we now have something to show for it! The delay in support was not because we weren't listening, but because there have been many great new features we have been waiting to support. Here is a taste of some of those features...

(Please visit the site to view this media)

As you can see there have been MANY great new changes to the UI which allow much richer integration with Outlook! Offline support is now much more robust -- allowing you to have a complete snapshot of a work item even if you aren't connected. Plus - The new hierarchical work items will be fully exposed and supported in this upcoming release.

We are diligently working on this release and hope to have all the minor kinks worked out in the coming weeks. Look for an updated build, posted on our site, in the very near future!

TeamSpec with TFS 2010 Features Video

Joe Buys — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:45:00 GMT

Recently we announced that we will be simultaneously be releasing TeamSpec with the release of VS 2010 and TFS 2010. The video below highlights the benefits of TeamSpec supporting the new features of TFS 2010.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

As you can see TeamSpec now supports all the great new features of TFS 2010. For more information and to get a trial of this product yourself, please visit our Downloads page!

TeamLook and TeamSpec to simultaneously-ship with Visual Studio 2010

eric — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:11:14 GMT

TeamSolutions, LLC, Visual Studio Industry Partner*, announces plans to simultaneously-ship TeamLook and TeamSpec with Visual Studio 2010 prior to 5/30/2010.

TeamLook is a convenient software project dashboard that allows all stakeholders in a software development project to communicate and collaborate using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server from within Microsoft Office Outlook.

TeamSpec provides rich team project artifact management directly inside Microsoft Office Word allowing specification, requirement and other document content to maintain integrity with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server.

* The VSIP relationship is currently listed under Personify Design. Personify Design spun off TeamLook and TeamSpec into its own brand (and company) called TeamSolutions, LLC in 2009.

TeamSpec and Team System Solutions in the news!

Joe Buys — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:05:00 GMT

Recently there was a great article about the new ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) tools and features found in VSTS 2010. TeamSpec was referenced through our old company, Personify Design:

"Microsoft is also seeing a rise in requirements management solutions from companies like Personify Design..."

Read the full article here.

Note: Personify Design spun off TeamLook and TeamSpec into its own brand (and company) called TeamSolutions, LLC in early 2009.

TeamSpec for Word 2010 and TFS 2010 -- Released for BETA!

Joe Buys — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:20:00 GMT

Yes. Forever has arrived!

TeamSpec v2.7, with support for Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010, is finally here!

Download it here: http://www.teamsystemsolutions.com/teamspec/download.aspx

I'll update this post in the near future to give you a better understanding of what the enhancements and features of v2.7 include, but for now, there are additional web updates to make!

Word 2007 Ribbon not showing TeamSpec Images

Joe Buys — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:50:00 GMT

The Word 2007 Ribbon bar can be a little finicky at times (to say the least). There have been numerous posts elsewhere on how to manipulate the Ribbon bar to show what you want, but not much else that explains errors and problems you sometimes encounter when writing add-ins utilizing the Ribbon bar.

Since we originally released the first Beta of TeamSpec, well over a year and a half ago now, we have received a handful of reports that sometimes the Ribbon bar will not show the Images that go with the buttons (see below). Internally, we encounter this very infrequently which makes tracking this issue down extremely difficult. Plus, everyone knows how developers can be... "Hey, it didn't repro on my machine, so it isn't a bug!" :)

As it turns out, if there is an operation that takes a little time to complete (more than a second or so from our testing), during the loading of the Ribbon bar, the Ribbon loading UI will silently fail and quit processing the remainder of the Ribbon loading. Images are one of the last things that are populated when building the Ribbon, so if you have a configuration file that you are reading to determine what should show on the ribbon, and your computer is under heavy disk load, you may see this error. Here is what the ribbon should look like:

For other Ribbon UI developers, make sure that your ribbon loading code is very small and that you are not doing any additional processing in the ribbon logic to avoid this problem for your add-ins.

So what’s your process template?

eric — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:58:56 GMT

Almost everyone knows about the extensibility of the process template that defines the team project within Team Foundation Server. I’m always interested in hearing what other teams have done to modify either the Agile or CMMI template to better tailor it to their internal processes. So I thought I’d share what we’ve done to extend the process template ourselves.

We are big fans of the Agile methodology and work in a semi-scrum environment. We started with the standard Agile work items (Bug, Task, …) and everything was working pretty well. Fairly soon though we found we could really use some additional states on the work items to allow us to better report on the current status of our work. This was before the days of the power tools that have really simplified these types of changes. We jumped on the internet and started reading about witimport.exe and how to modify the XML that defines the work item types. We added the states and happily moved along.

After our team grew we realized we needed additional workflow to better manage the work as it moved through the team. So we once again extended the process template. Now, for example, the work item lifecycle looks something like this:

A change request from the customer would be communicated to the project manager via email. She would then use TeamLook to create a work item and assign the appropriate priority and severity. At this point it would be dropped into a pending iteration waiting for the next triage meeting.
At the triage meeting we estimate the effort needed to complete the work item and assign start and finish dates. This allows us to manage the work within Microsoft Project very easily, but that will need to be another blog post. We also assign the iteration that the work will be completed in. The iterations are generally a month long, depending on the project. The work item state is set to scheduled and ready for a developer to begin work.
The developer uses TeamLook to view their work items and sort them based on the priority and importance. After choosing the most critical work item the state is changed to in-progress signaling that work is underway.
When the developer has done their code review and checks in the changes, the work item is associated with the changeset, and TFS changes the work item state to resolved.
A continuous integration build is fired off and an email sent to the team informing them of the state of the build. A nightly build runs that incorporates all of the changes checked in during the day and those changes are pushed to the test environment.
The tester reviews the previous day’s changes and validates the work. Upon approval the changes are pushed to the staging environment and the work item state is changed to verified.
The project manager uses TeamLook to aggregate the verified work items and sends the list to the customer to notify them that their requests have been staged. The customer can confirm the changes meet their expectations to the project manager, who then changes the state of the work item to reviewed.
When the iteration’s release date arrives the deployment lead verifies that all work items are set to reviewed and can be released to production. We’ve created an internal tool that can pull out the changed code from source control based on a team query. This simplifies checking what changes need to be pushed to production.

That’s a lot to read, so where’s a pretty picture instead?

TeamSpec/TeamLook for VSTS 2010

Joe Buys — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:38:00 GMT

There have been many great emails to our info/support alias asking about TFS 2010 support. Here are the common questions/answers that we get...

First Question: Will TeamLook/TeamSpec be supporting TFS 2010?

The answer is finally here -- YES! TFS 2010 has always been on our roadmap for supporting and extending TeamSpec and the rest of the TeamSolutions product suite for quite some time. The changes that are being released for TFS 2010 are a great compliment to the feature set already existing in both our products.

Second question: Will TeamLook/TeamSpec support TFS 2010 Beta 1?

Unfortunately, the answer is No. There are two reasons for this. Primarily its because we are not ready to release support for the applications yet. We haven't completed our internal testing and we don't want to prematurely release something that isn't "Show Ready". Secondly, there are some compatibility issues with how we build TeamLook/TeamSpec (using VS 2008) and how MS built some of the new controls for TeamExplorer 2010 Beta 1 (requiring applications to have been built targeting the .Net 4.0 Framework). We have been told by Microsoft that they are fixing this in future releases of TeamExplorer 2010, however for now we cannot load some of the controls on the Work Item Tracking screen.

Third Question: Can I be part of a beta pilot program when you are getting close with TeamSpec/TeamLook for TFS 2010?

We are working with select customers that absolutely have to have support for TFS 2010. If you are interested in joining this group, contact info@teamsystemsolutions.com.

Cheers,
~Joe

Welcome to TFS Tips and Tricks

eric — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:47:00 GMT

Having worked with Microsoft's Team Foundation Server since TFS 2005 was pre-beta we have gained a deep knowledge of the API and its inner workings. Starting with the Outlook Starter Kit back in 2005 as an example of how to interact with the work item object model, we have had the opportunity to work with many of the methods and objects exposed through the TFS API.

I'd like to use this blog to share some of the tips and tricks we have found over the years. Hopefully it will be helpful for other developers working with the TFS API as well as a repository of tricks and helper apps so we can find them later as well. J

I will also share some of the ways we have modified the Agile process template to work with our internal methodologies at TeamSolutions as well as its sister company, Personify Design. The extensibility of TFS is really one of its core strengths, and I think we've managed to do some substantial "extensions" (including TeamLook and TeamSpec!)

Thanks for stopping by!
Eric

Facebook Developer Garage and Methodology

Juan — Tue, 06 May 2008 05:19:00 GMT

I attended the Seattle Facebook Developer Garage tonight and kudos to the folks who organized the event! It was a fantastic event that was literally bursting at seams with people. There must have been over 200 people at the event from all over the Pacific Northwest. I have used facebook for some time and get how pervasive it has become, however, there was a large number of people coming up with very elegant/simple solutions to interesting problems. Maybe I’m late to the party here, but these social networking platforms are enabling real businesses that are services thousands to millions of users.

Onto the point of the post: At the event, there were a serious of developer and some business oriented talks (each talk was about 10-15 minutes). All was fun, the crowd was laughing and listening- doing what happens at most of these user group type talks. Then we got into a design oriented session that included the word “beautiful” in the title. Although the speaker had some great points, people did not react the way they had reacted to the other sessions – this was a talk based on subjective characteristics and a series of “steps” that we could follow to achieve these attributes.

I realized that we had crossed a type of boundary between things that could be proven and ideas/methods that seemed to be the speaker’s opinions. I think this is a common problem when people speak about best practices/methodologies. I have seen this reaction many times – I’ll even admit that I’ve seen it at talks that I’ve given before. I guess there’s no better way to learn something that to experience it for yourself. So what do I think this speaker could have done better when talking about his methods:

Prepare the audience for a session on “best practices.” Developers are really good at finding holes in things. It’s important for people to get in a mindset that these best practices are just one of potentially many means to the end.
Give examples. Supporting each of his principle with a number of examples. Some that clearly followed it and others that did not.
Understand important metrics. Identifying metrics allow people to track and optimize them. Not all metrics are created equal, but metrics are important in understanding the dynamics of the system/progress.
Identify stakeholders. Personas are just as important to the method/best practice as they are to the system that is being created.

In the spirit of a “best practices” blog post, I’ll be up front about my list of principles J. These are some principles that I’ve learned over my time working on software methods and it’s not intended to be an exhaustive list.

Jeff Beehler talks about the VSTS Project (planning and operations) on Channel 9

Juan — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:33:00 GMT

Jeff Beehler was interviewed by Brian Keller on Channel 9 and talks about how VSTS runs their team from the highest level (Pillars), though Value Props, Features, all the way down through Tasks, which could even have sub-tasks. You'll notice that he spends a lot of time in both VSTS Reporting as well as navigating the Work Item system which is where these project management entities (Pillars, Value Props, Features, Tasks) are stored. Since Rosario has strongly typed links between work items, it's a very natural experience to dig around (both up and down) the links graph to learn about different aspects of the project.

This is a really interesting video from both a business and requirements perspective because it shows the continuum between the operations of the project at the Task level as it relates to the schedule (bottom levels) and the business value delivered to customers at the Pillars and Value Propositions (top levels). Remember, it’s not good enough to deliver quality software if you miss the target for the end-user (business) value and Jeff shows how by using TFS he can understand, not only the state, but also the dynamics of the project at both ends and everything in between.

The question that lots of people will have is “How can I get that level of visibility and project management in my team?” I think the answer has two parts: (1) What is the level of visibility you need for your project. The VSTS team is a relatively big team broken down to many sub-teams which delivers releases at a specific rate. The levers you need is a function of your team’s goals related to managing releases, quality, work breakdown, resources, etc… It may look similar to this or require more or less levers and visibility points (2) As Jeff mentioned, those reports were custom reports built by his team. I’ve yet to run into two teams that work the same way. Lots of teams say “We’re Agile” and even then there are always subtle differencse at best. That means that you’ll end up customizing reports, especially at the higher levels. At the lower level (Tasks) Jeff shows a cumulative work diagram that is very similar (if not the same, I didn’t ask Jeff if it is the same so I’ll say it’s similar) to the Remaining Work report found in MSF. Bottom line is you’ll have to have someone who knows the TFS database and warehouse build these reports for you.

Check out the Channel 9 Video at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=391362.

TeamSpec on Channel 9!

Juan — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:44:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to demo TeamSpec to Brian Keller and the Channel 9 camera! I want to thank Brian for the opportunity to show some of the software we've been building at Personify for the last 2+ years. One thing you'll notice about the video is that it was done in one take. There was something scary about the idea of one take, but it turned out to make the session more natural.

Check out the Channel 9 TeamSpec video at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=389257.

The folks at Channel 9 (as well as 8 and 10) are providing some really great value for the industry. I've been spending more time watching videos on all kinds of topics/areas.

Mix08 and SEPG 2008

Juan — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:34:00 GMT

I will be attending both Mix08 in Las Vegas this week as well as SEPG 2008 in Tampa starting on March 17.

At Mix, I'll be roaming the sessions as well as the hands-on-labs rooms.

At SEPG, I will be at the Personify Design station of the Microsoft booth. If you are attending SEPG drop me a line or swing by the Microsoft booth. I will have some tasty demos of our recent release of TeamSpec!

Yes, March is going to be a crazy month :) You can either find me on LinkedIn or Facebook and send me a message...

TeamSpec in the community...

Juan — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:20:00 GMT

It's very exciting to see the different creations that people in the TFS community are creating using TeamSpec. At the outset of TeamSpec, we set to solve the stale document problem. In the process, we ended up created an environment in Word that enables documents to stay synchronized at the item level.

Check out Willy-Peter's (VSTS MVP) post about his initial experience with TeamSpec at http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2008/02/21/teamspec-v1-0-what-a-pleasure-on-tfs2008.aspx.

Let us know how you're using TeamSpec. Post it on your blog or send us mail and we'll post it for you.

Oh, and by the way: We're very close to finishing Rich Text support for those work item fields that are stored as the HTML format on TFS. Rob Schlender (one of rock-star devs) is truly making magic in making Rich Text support a reality. I'll make sure to get a video together once we get closer.

TeamLook for TFS 2008 launches!

Juan — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 01:53:00 GMT

We're very excited (and happy) to announce the release of TeamLook for TFS 2008! In addition to support for TFS 2008, we’ve made some usability and performance improvements which also make TeamLook for TFS 2005 better. You’ll notice that we’ve now united the installer for all configurations making it much easier to install. You can download the new TeamLook bits at http://www.personifydesign.com/products/teamlook/download.aspx.

For those of you that haven’t had a chance to learn about some of the exciting improvements introduced to Team Foundation Server 2008, check out Brian Harry’s blog entry on the TFS 2008 feature list.

As always, send us mail with questions and comments. We love to hear about interesting uses of both TeamLook and TeamSpec! If you haven’t checked out TeamSpec, make sure to check out http://www.personifydesign.com/products/teamspec/discover.aspx.

Thank you for your continued support!

TeamSpec v1.0 (for TFS 2005 and TFS 2008) has launched and is available now!

Juan — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 01:16:00 GMT

“What does the spec say it should do?” These words can come from anyone on the IT team! We’ve heard them from testers that are verifying functionality. We’ve heard them from managers asking to understand project progress or approving a future budget. We’ve heard it from developers that are about to implement functionality. We’ve heard it from end users that ask about why it works like it does today or hoping for how it will work in the future. The reason this is an interesting and honest question is because we all expect the intentions of the software to change as we learn more and solve parts of the problem. The problem is that most teams are moving so fast that we forget to update the spec when we make decisions and implement the functionality in the code or operating environment. Without a herculean effort by someone on the team, inevitably, the spec becomes stale. It doesn’t take too long before people stop asking the question because everyone knows that the spec just doesn’t know: it’s stale!

Wouldn’t it be nice if the spec knew about the changes in the project and was able to synchronize to the current plan? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could push content from your current spec documents into a centralized database that will manage the lifetime of those requirements as they change? Wouldn’t it be nice if we had document templates that could make it very simple to create new requirements in the project? Wouldn’t it be nice to change the contents of a document spec and update the centralized database directly from the document? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could throw away old specs if the formatting and layout of the document just didn’t make sense anymore and create a new spec with the most up-to-date content and new formatting? Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to answer the “What does the spec say it should do?” question so many times that your colleagues and constituents one again believe that the spec does in fact describe how the system should work?

With Personify Design TeamSpec and Microsoft Team Foundation Server, you can!

To learn more about TeamSpec, watch the videos at http://www.personifydesign.com/products/teamspec/discover.aspx.

Download the TeamSpec trial at http://www.personifydesign.com/products/teamspec/download.aspx.

Thanks to everyone in the community that has provided feedback during the betas. We really appreciate your expertise and cannot wait to see the types of specs you create using TeamSpec! Send email to teamspec@personifydesign.com and tell us about how you’re using TeamSpec- we love to see your creations!

Terry Clancy to talk on Requirements and VSTS on Thursday, Jan 17th!

Juan — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Terry Clancy will be giving an online talk/webcast on Requirements and VSTS tomorrow! Apologies for the short notice, but there's still time to register.

Register at: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032362264&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Event Overview: Developing precise and accurate requirements is a crucial step in the success of a development project or a new business process. Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, along with Microsoft Visual Studio partner solutions, can help companies improve their requirements development process. A number of partner solutions provide the capability to define requirements and store them in Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, integrating these requirements into the application development life cycle. In this webcast, we provide a detailed look at requirements solutions that integrate with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System.

Presenters: Terry Clancy, Business Development Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Videos: Managing Requirements using TeamSpec and TFS

Juan — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 02:34:00 GMT

The journey into creating more videos that show TeamSpec is action is DONE! Well, for now :). Visit the new 'Discover TeamSpec' page at http://www.personifydesign.com/products/teamspec/discover.aspx to view the six videos that show how TeamSpec makes TFS work items a first class citizen inside Microsoft Word. The first five videos are quick (3-5 minute) where I show the core scenarios that we're enabling with TeamSpec. The sixth video is a (15 minute) feature walkthrough where I show all the parts that enable the scenarios shown in the other videos.

The videos are titled:

Using a document template and TeamSpec
Connect existing or new specs to TFS
Create specs from requirements in TFS
Manage changes in specs
Find specs from TFS work items
TeamSpec Feature Walkthrough

Please send us feedback and comments.

Oh, almost forgot - we'll be launching TeamSpec next week! Back to work... :)

TeamSpec Feature Walkthrough Video!

Juan — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 01:51:00 GMT

First off, Happy New Year everyone! I hope you had a great holiday break and are ready for an exciting 2008!

We're in the final stages of stabilization for TeamSpec and I've started to put together some videos showing off the functionality. I started my journey into creating these videos in the "correct" way, which would result in a beautifully polished video, great timing, the right talking points, perfect scenarios, etc... About a few hours into it I realized that my goal wasn't necessarily to produce an award winning set of videos, but instead show how TeamSpec makes TFS Work Items a first class citizen inside Microsoft Word. With TeamSpec, gone are the days when a spec becomes stale and there's nothing you can do about it. Just synchronize the document with TFS. If you don't like the formatting you used for the User Stories section of your document, wipe it and use a customized TeamSpec Skin to recreate that section of the document with new formatting!

It's better to watch the video and see TeamSpec in action than to read me rave about it. Yes, we use/dogfood it at Personify and we love it! We can't wait to fix the remaining bugs and have you (the customers) start using it too. :) With that, please click on the link below to watch the TeamSpec Features Walkthrough video.

http://personifydesign.com/products/Videos/TeamSpec%20Feature%20Walkthrough/TeamSpec%20Feature%20Walkthrough.html

TechEd EMEA Keynote and Personify Design

Juan — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:21:00 GMT

It's always great to see your work on stage! Today I had the pleasure of sitting in the audience at the TechEd EMEA keynote where Soma (Corporate VP Developer Division), Tony Goodhew (Senior Product Manager), and Dan Fernandez (Lead Product Manager) delivered a FANTASTIC keynote and set of demos. I wanted to congratulate the Personify team in Seattle for building some of the very exciting parts of the demo which received some significant applause. Specifically, the Silverlight based aisle shopping experience, the WPF based 3D product viewing control which showed the quince paste container inside the Microsoft Word custom task pane, and the WPF based interactive 3D in-store management application which allows the store manager to navigate the store in 3D and place products directly on the shelves.

Congratulations to Soma, Tony, Dan, and the rest of the folks at Microsoft for a great keynote and more importantly delivering a very compelling set of software tools!

Justifying Requirements in the Software Team

Juan — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 01:26:00 GMT

I’ve received a few requests for help on justifications for Requirements efforts in teams. Often it’s someone trying to get resources from their management with hopes of understanding and evolving their software process. The ultimate challenge is identifying the right amount or balance of Requirements Management and Business Analysis will help the team. Given the caveat that I have never seen two teams that are the same, here goes…

Justification for Requirements Management to the business managers is sometimes a catch-22 situation. It’s an investment to visualize and breakdown project requirements while understanding the problems that stem in project requirements requires visibility into the software process. On the other hand, treating IT investments as a black box is a bad idea and can result in missed deadlines, delivering the wrong solution, and a low quality deliverable. The right amount of process in the software team is a function of how efficiency is managed and optimized. In other words, manage and measure those things with variability that can benefit from efficiencies.

Here are some general problems that are answered by involving business users via requirements and traceability. There are some pretty extensive studies that have been done on Requirements Management, Project Management, and Business Analysis which provide literally volumes of information.

Stakeholder vs. developer language differences

Developers and end-users/stakeholders live at different levels of abstractions and therefore communicate using different context and vocabulary. It’s important to capture the stakeholder requirements and map them to the development domain.

Change happens everywhere - in the business domain (just as well as the development domain)

When the business learns something about the business environment the Development team needs to assess the impact that change will have on the project. Without a set of up to date requirements which are mapped to development artifacts (design, architecture, tasks, bugs, etc…), it’s very difficult rank the change request relative to the existing state of the project and resources.

Stakeholder need to be part of the extended team

Validating requirements and their implications with stakeholders or end-users will not only foster a feeling of partnership with stakeholders, but also minimize complexity derived from scope creep. Stakeholder reviews need to enable stakeholders to understand status and implications of their decisions.

Delivery contracts for building trust

Building trust based on accountability and delivering what is promised can be accomplished using Requirement Specifications. Ultimately, if you can’t describe what is going to be delivered then there is a good chance it will never be delivered.

Quality Assurance (QA) needs to know what/how to verify intentions and goals

QA needs to understand all levels of intent (functional, non-functional, business, etc…) in a system in order to validate the system. In some cases it may make sense to involve QA in the planning process to ensure testability in the defined requirements.

Project Planning and Operations are separate

Planning should feed into Operations and vice versa. The iteration between the two disciplines requires a series of transformations which enable traceability from high level artifacts such as business goals to low level artifacts such as code.

Estimating size and complexity requires context

Deciding on the size, however measured, requires both a top-down structured divide-and-conquer style approach as well as a bottom-up verification that everything fits into the defined higher level context/requirements. Without this bi-directional checks and balances the code can implement more than you need or the solution can end up not solving the problem.

Scope management

Defining the part of the problem that will not be solved is just as or more important than defining the problem you will attempt to solve. Because they complement each other, defining the part of the problem you will not solve will help specify the other part.

The following are some resources I use when discussing Requirements Management and Business Analysis. If you have some favorites, I’d love to learn about them.

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirements_analysis#Problems -This enumerates a list of problems between developers and users/stakeholders
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Requirements_Specification - System Requirements Specification and a list of deliverable types
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_development_life_cycle - SLC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_analyst - Business Analyst definition and breakdown

Software Engineering Institute

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/str/descriptions/reqtracing.html
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/06.reports/06tr008.html - The Requirements Development and Requirements Management section of the document

International Institute of Business Analysis

http://download.theiiba.org/files/BOKV1_6.pdf - Business Analysis Body of Knowledge

Mike Cohn – Mountain Goat Software

http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/article_view/27-advantages-of-user-stories-for-requirements - Advantages of User Stories for Requirements

TechEd Developers in Barcelona, Spain

Juan — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:49:00 GMT

Drop me a line if you are heading to Barcelona for TechEd Developers on November 5th and you would like to meet up. I'm always up for meeting up with people and talking shop. (juanjperez -a-t- gmail dot com)

Cheers,
Juan