Nexus: scale your Scrum efforts

Scrum.org has been working for a while on expanding and bringing more structure to the original ideas on how to scale Scrum brought forth in the book Agile Project Management with Scrum. Now it has launched a Scaled Professional Scrum course and Scrum Practitioner Open Assessment.

The Scaled Professional Scrum course covers scaling agile concepts and Nexus in particular:  “Nexus™ Framework and approximately 40 practices which cause the Nexus and your scaling initiative to operate predictably.”

The Scrum Practitioner Open assessment complements the other many provides assessments and allows you to benchmark your ability to participate in a Scrum team, with focus on multiple teams engaged in a scaled development initiative.

Here is a nice interview with Ken Schwaber at InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/03/assessment-program.

I will be coming back to this topic with in-depth analysis and how it compares with other frameworks. For the moment, let us just say congratulations to all who have contributed to the effort. Smile

Latest Gartner reports confirms Microsoft ALM Leadership

The latest Gartner report from February 2015 once more puts Microsoft in the leadership quadrant:

image

The report itself shows interesting trends on the ALM market as a whole, but has some limitations on that vision almost as contradiction after having changed from “ALM” to “ADLM” a couple years ago, especially when it acknowledges in the summary that “The push to speed up the pace of delivery is increasing the focus on agile and DevOps practices in application development life cycle management.”

Then it mentions DevOps when talking about IBM, Atlassian and Rally, but not Microsoft or VersionOne. This is puzzling because Microsoft, and maybe IBM are the only that actually have a vision for the operations side of ALM. The report in itself

It says for IBM and Rally:

IBM has a large, comprehensive suite of ADLM products covering the full life cycle, and a strong position in supporting DevOps practices.

Rally has a strong understanding of agile, DevOps and SAFe principles.

Both IBM and Microsoft bought 3rd party release management tools almost at the same time, and Microsoft has gone even further in integrating its Release Management tools with its VSO offering. If you take into account its Azure DevOps capabilities, it is the de facto leader. However this seems to have gone unnoticed.

Or maybe the report is based on an earlier version: the same quote on SAFe from the previous report remains unchanged, even though Microsoft released SAFe-ready process templates for TFS last September. The current one reads:

Microsoft lacks the agile depth of pure-play vendors around the enterprise agile capabilities of project portfolio analysis, and support of SAFe.

At any rate, all these half-baked references on DevOps point to it trying to be trendy while at the same time directly contradicting its own statement from 2013:

The application development life cycle management (ADLM) tool market is focused on the planning and governance activities of the software development life cycle (SDLC). ADLM products are focused on the "development" portion of an application's life, with the term ADLM evolving from the term application life cycle management (ALM).

And this is because more and more DevOps also includes managing the lifecycle of released applications, such as with HockeyApp. Can you separate the operations piece of ALM from DevOps and claim it is pure development? I figure Gartner might be renaming this report, again, pretty soon.

How to display the TFS burndown chart in full screen mode

I got this question from a user: Does anyone know how I can display the burn down chart in full screen mode? A scenario for this would be to show the burndown (with auto refresh, if possible) in a team area on a big screen TV.

The only way, out of the box, that I know to do this is indirectly using using Chrome:
- Click the chart. It will open as a pop-up window.
- Right click the chart image. Choose "Open Image in New Tab". Choose the new tab with the chart image.
- Press F11 to put the browser in full screen mode
- Use the browser zoom options to increase the size of the image
- Notice that the image is a URL to an API call, so you should be able to refresh it by pressing F5. I don't know how to easy way to auto refresh other than using some kind of Coded UI or Selenium script. Also look for "Auto refresh" in Chrome extensions.

If you know a better way, please send me an email and I will add it here.

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