Wondering about ALM: Go listen to the expert - Brian Keller

Hi All, I've received this exciting note from Suliman Noor Mahomed, the Audience Marketing Manager at Microsoft South Africa:

The ALM guy, Brian Keller is in Johannesburg next week. He is here for just 2 days before he flies off, so this is your opportunity to come listen to him talk about application lifecycle management with TFS and Visual Studio. Below is the full details

Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2012 presented by Brian Keller

Date: 19 September 2012

Time: 15:00 – 17:30, Check in: 14:30

Audience: Architects, Developers, Decision Makers, Testers, Developer Managers

Price: Free

Place: Microsoft Campus, Johannesburg

Level: 200-250

To register: click here

Honey I have restored the database

A few weeks ago I published the blog Honey I Shrunk the Database, and I mentioned a way of shrinking your database.

The method to be discussed during this blog was inspired by - PaulRandal – “Why You Should NotShrink Your Data Files”

SQL Server 2012: Restore Fails With Deadlock

We had an interesting situtation at a client where we could not restore a SQL Server 2008 R2 backup onto SQL Server 2012. The restore would fail at 100% with a deadlock.

Logging made simple

This may be old news for most, but for those of you who have not used log4net, this could be quite beneficial…

Isolation Levels

As a follow up to my NOLOCK blog I thought it would be a good idea to discuss the five different isolation levels in SQL Server. These are as follows:

Blogging Guidelines For Dummies

As I have come to learn in the past few months, the hardest part of a Blog is finding a topic that inspires not only yourself, but will also draw in readers from a variety of backgrounds in the related area of the Blog... For instance, if your area of Blogging is based on a Rugby crowd the biggest mistake you can make is to Blog about The Beautiful Game (Soccer).

AGILE

How The FOS team has changed in the past few months- Using agile

I would like to share my experience that I have had on the FOS team in the past couple of years, and how things changed in the past few months when we adapted to agile mythology.

In April 2011 was a very stressfull month for our team, we were all stressed out, under pressure and working long hours. Each member of the team were busy in their own “world” ; trying to get their tasks completed in time, which lead to poor quality development and where most of the time work to be re-done and at time not even tested by our tester before it was release to the client,  because of all the rush and deadlines. This all happening, making the client frustrated in the process.

Now if I compare what the team is today and what we were last year April, we have changed as a TEAM – we have grown as a team and adapted well with Agile.

I believe Agile has helped us in the following ways:

     

1.)    Communication

-          Between the team and the client

-          Stand Ups (Being aware of what our team mates are busy with)

2.)    Weekly Release

-          This is a great opportunity for the client to see progress and change     requirement if necessary in time and not when task is fully completed where it requires the developer to re-do his/her work.

3.)    More awareness/ Visibility

4.)    Transparency to client and team

5.)    Planning  & Organizing