The Tech.Ed community project is off and racing…
August 23, 2006
Well, day one of Tech.Ed is over and I am back at the hotel taking stock. It has been really quite amazing to see how attendees and a few individuals in particular (you know who you are) have taken to building a solution for The Smith Family community project.
Early this morning (like 1am early) I punched the high level scenarios that we would be using as the specification to develop code from. We had a kick-off meeting at about 9am this morning to get our project leaders accounts sorted out and have a brief overview of the kind of application we are building. From there the team went forth and broke down the scenarios into tasks which could then be completed by delegates.
We have been really lucky to have so many TFS savvy people working on the project. By about mid-day we had TFS Integrator installed performing Continuous Integration duties, which in turn runs a series of automated tests.
It’s not all wine and roses…
Obviously running a software project is risky because with so many cooks in the kitchen a few problems start to manifest themselves.
- Inconsistent coding styles (live with it).
- Inconsistent approaches to data access.
- Ugly duckling syndrome.
None of these problems are insurmountable, and in fact what we lack in co-ordination we gain in passion. To be honest this was always going to happen we try to compress this kind of Scope into a three day period when there are a lot of transient developers in the mix.
Next Steps
Tomorrow morning I will be getting to the Dev’Garten early to do what I call a “scrub” of the work item store. Basically it is the process of quickly surveying recent activity and making sure that work items reflect the truth. We can then go into the second iteration with a much clearer picture of where we are.
Tomorrow I hope to pose some statistics about the project at what should be our mid-way point.
August 23, 2006 at 11:21 pm
[...] TechEd – It’s On, And I’m Actually Awake It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me. I finished up at my old job, I had to get ready to come to TechEd, I had to start getting ready to start at my new job. Things got so bad that Frank had to interview himself (sorry again Frank, I knew there was something I’d forgotten to do)! But TechEd is on, and it’s going off. It’s currently day two. I’ve got my presentation this afternoon with the Bill McCarthy, and the party is tonight (I still think there’ll be some band playing, but Frank did say in the opening keynote that Anthony Mundine will be on the door
The Community Project is coming along well, the DevGarten is just rocking. Over on the other side of the exhibition hall there’s XBoxes and Media Centres galore, and plenty of coffee to keep us chugging along. The Ask the Experts dinner was enjoyable – and there were even some VB people that wanted my advice. Actually, there weren’t too many people with VB questions – but I noticed a lot of people needing help with other things. It just goes to show that if you work with VB, you don’t have problems 
Over the last two days I’ve sat three exams (so far, I’ve got one left) and passed them all – 70-536, 70-526 and 70-529! This morning I’ll be sitting 70-528, which means that at the end (if I pass) I’ll have an MCTS in Windows Forms, Web, and Distributed Applications. $60 bucks a sitting is great deal. Well done to everyone who out this event together – it’s all going smoothly, and so far I’ve heard no complaints. If you haven’t made it in this year but you’re nearby, why not buy yourself a day pass and check it all out? They were right. TechEd this year certainly is rocking 
I’m going to go trawl the exhibition stands for another round of free stuff! Filed Under: TechEd [...]