Posted by Richard | November 4, 2015 | Microsoft, Scrum, Team Services, TFS
Microsoft, please give us a Scrum process template

In 2014, the Scrum Guide was moved off of Scrum.org and posted to ScrumGuides.org. At the same time, all of the major Scrum organizations in the world acknowledged this as...

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Posted by Richard | September 21, 2015 | Team Services, TFS
Dude, where's my releases?

You may have noticed when creating a new Scrum team project in Visual Studio Online or Team Foundation Server 2015, that the iteration list looks a bit different. Yes, Microsoft...

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Posted by Richard | August 17, 2015 | Visual Studio 2015
Turn off the Diagnostics Tools window in Visual Studio 2015

I'm sure it's awesome. I'm sure it doesn't impact performance (much). I'm sure my apps would be more awesome if I used it, but ... ... today I want to...

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Posted by Richard | August 3, 2015 | Windows
Turn off Automatic Updates on Windows 10 Professional

Call me weird, but when I create and maintain virtual machines for demonstration and training, I like to be in control of if/when Windows updates are installed. This is fit...

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Posted by Richard | June 3, 2015 | Conferences, Scrum, Visual Studio 2015
Visual Studio Live! in Austin

Update: Added additional links for my same talks at VSLive! in San Francisco today (17 June, 2015) Thank you to those who attended my two talks today. I enjoyed our...

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Posted by Richard | February 24, 2015 | TFS, Visual Studio ALM
Use Excel to Create Repetitive Work Items

Teams often ask me for any shortcuts to periodically creating the same work items, such as for each sprint or release. In other words, they want to create the same...

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Posted by Richard | January 29, 2015 | Scrum, TFS
Promoting a PBI to a Feature (Epic)

For Scrum Teams using TFS 2013 to create and manage their Product Backlog, they may want to take advantage of the new Agile Portfolio. This "higher level" backlog allows a...

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Posted by Richard | November 17, 2014 | Scrum, Team Services, TFS 2013
Team members in the Readers group can create work items!

Watch out. This could happen to you and your team. Let's assume you have a single team project with three teams (Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato) ... Next, let's assume you have...

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Posted by Richard | November 14, 2014 | Scrum, Team Services, TFS 2013
Using the Kanban Board to Implement a Definition of Ready

More and more teams are adopting a Definition of Ready (also known as DoR or Readiness Criteria) to avoid starting work on PBIs that are ill-defined, such as those that do not...

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Posted by Richard | November 14, 2014 | Scrum, TFS 2013
What’s New in the Visual Studio Scrum 2013.4 Process Template

Many Visual Studio and .NET announcements were made this week. A minor one was the RTM of Visual Studio 2013 Update 4. This update included improvements and bug fixes to...

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Posted by Richard | October 21, 2014 | Conferences, Development, Visual Studio 2013
A unique load testing experiment

Most of the guidance you'll find about Visual Studio Ultimate Load Tests suggests that they are only for load testing Web Performance tests. Actually, they can be used to load...

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Posted by Richard | May 9, 2014 | Community, Conferences, Development
Develop.Idaho 2014 Videos Published

Updated 20 May: Added presentations (but no videos) from the "Business of Software" track. It took a few extra days to get these produced and published, but they are now...

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Posted by Richard | March 24, 2014 | Scrum, TFS 2013
What’s New in the Visual Studio Scrum 2013.2 Process Template

I noticed today that the process templates in Visual Studio Online are showing a “.2” suffix in their names. I’m not exactly sure when this update occurred, but am pretty...

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Posted by Richard | March 17, 2014 | TFS, Webcast
Free TFS 2013 Webinars in March and April 2014

I noticed that Microsoft Customer Service & Support (CSS) is offering a number of great webinars in the coming days on various TFS and ALM topics ... TFS Release Management...

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Posted by Richard | February 26, 2014 | TFS, Visual Studio 2013
The ProcessTemplateEditorPackage package did not load correctly

Yesterday, while using Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2013 to customize a process template, I ran into this error … As suggested, I checked the ActivityLog.xml, but it didn’t offer...

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