Project Setup

Create a Project for the software development being managed and set up your components as required.

Next ensure that your Versions are set up to match your Sprints (Project Administration -> Versions):

Nested Versions, Sprints Defined

Note that you should allocated Start and Release dates for each version (Sprint).

Sprint Planning

The easy (and fun) part is actually planning what work items (issues) go into your Sprints.  This is very simple in Gemini because you can quickly filter your issue base and allocate via drag-drop using the Planner feature:

Using Project Planner for Managing Sprints

Note how the Planner is influenced by what items you have filtered by: even the axis depth can be controlled to show more and less data elements.

Some tips on actual work items and selecting them for Sprints:

• Allocate Start and Due dates to issues to help people remember the order of their work items
• Allocate Estimated Effort to each issue and record actual time logs after work is complete
• Close each work item (issue) when it is completed (this means changing issue status to CLOSED)

Sprint Progress Tracking

Use the Versions tab on the Project home page to quickly track Sprint progress:

Sprint Burndown Charts

If more work items are added to the Sprint after it starts, then these can be seen as RED bars on the chart.  It’s usually useful to watch for these as they may explain why all work items have not been completed by the end of the Sprint. (Technically speaking, ALL work items should be logged and agreed upon BEFORE the Sprint starts.)

Product and Spring Backlogs

Both Product and Sprint backlogs can be viewed from the Project’s Road Map tab:

That’s it!

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Installation

You can install the Gemini Check-in Policy for TFS from the Visual Studio Extension Manager (search “Online” section for “Gemini”) or download directly from the Visual Studio Gallery.

Linking Gemini to TFS Project

Once installed, here’s how you can link Gemini to your TFS Project (located within Team Explorer).

First, associate the Gemini Check-in Policy with your Source Control set up:

Associate Gemini Check-in Polocy

Next, click “Add…” on the Check-in Policy tab and select the Gemini Policy:

Select the Gemini Check-in Policy

Click “Edit…” to configure the Gemini Check-in Policy and specify your Gemini credentials:

Specify Gemini Credentials

Once the credentials have been provided, you will see the Gemini Check-in Policy listed under the check-in Policies tab:

Gemini Policy

Usage

When committing your work back to your repository, you can specify a Gemini Issue Id’s in the Comment box (specify multiple Issue Id’s like GEM:13 GEM:453 GEM:456):

Specifying Gemini Issue Id

The check-in comment and check-in files will then appear in Gemini against the specified Issue Id:

Check-in File Associations

Check-in appears as Gemini comment

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Project Managers frequently find themselves working in areas in which they are not experts.  Here in the handbook you shall learn how to predict that the client has failed to find an appropriate person to work with, before it becomes a major problem.  If you ever wondered why you had to work with so many “nice but incompetent”  people (you find out about them in that order), then read on.  But remember that what you learn here you should not speak of, this heady stuff is not for the uninitiated.

Bob works for a company that employs thousands of people all over the world, many of whom are renowned experts in their fields.  The company has problems with its Billing Systems (say) and Bob, himself a senior figure within the Finance team, has been asked to identify the problems, propose a solution and oversee its implementation.  Bob’s mission, though it is of great importance, is doomed to fail because Bob, smart though he is, is a Man Friday.

Man Friday – A person you give a task to simply because you can.

Few companies are mature enough to give Project Management training and devolve budgetary responsibility to department heads.  Without training and with little or no budgetary control, those same department heads will use whatever human resource is available to them, regardless of their suitability for the task at hand.  Given a problem to deal with they will quite simply turn to the nearest (and usually the only) resource, which is why you can find yourself on a multi-million dollar project facing off with the client’s secretary!  In Bob’s case he just happened to be free at the time that the Billing problems became such an issue that someone realised that something had to be done.  The error in the management’s thinking was to derive the equation:

Big Problem + Senior Person = Successful Outcome.

There is no basis in science or precedence for believing this equation to be true.  In fact, what Bob knows about Billing Systems could be written on the back of a postage stamp and the only adage that should have sprung to the minds of the executives who appointed him is: you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

That the world is full of people with vast knowledge and experience of billing systems occurs to nobody.  One such person could walk into the company, listen to the problems and write the solution down on a whiteboard in a couple of hours.  In fact, once told how the company operates, an expert would be able to predict all of the problems in the billing process.  Does the company go out and get one of these experts?  No. It uses Bob, a complete Billing newbie.  It will now take much longer and cost the company far more to implement a poor solution than it would have to get a perfect solution and some business process improvements to boot.  This is because Bob will make many mistakes, not least of which will be to follow the first law of Man Friday idiocy:

If you are a Man Friday and don’t know what you are doing then you must perpetuate the mistake by appointing other Man Fridays to help you.

Before you can say tickety-boo, Bob will have surrounded himself with a committee of the equally inept, reporting back to the uninformed, in the misguided belief that the business he works in is some kind of abstract institution that bills its clients in a way that only it can.

Black Arts practitioners, beware of working with a gaggle of collective numbkins, who do not know what they are doing!  In the absence of the ‘expert’, when things do not work, they will blame you.  You will also be deemed responsible for filling in the gaps in their knowledge!  Whatever it is you are managing, always employ the first rule of anti Man Friday idiocy:

There is no business process so complicated that it defies the skill of a single person to define a system to handle it.

Your task is to find that person if it is not you.  Flee from the “group defined” solution delivered to you by Bob and his ilk; it is based on a little knowledge and no experience.  Instead, hunt out the person who will tell you what the root of all the problems is and how to solve them, starting with the root.

Question: how will you recognise said expert?  After all, if in our example you are not a Billing expert yourself, are you not also part of the problem.

Answer: Experts can condense the task at hand or the problem they are solving to a single “thing”.  In our example with Bob, you would look for someone who might say that the one thing in Billing is to start with the contracts.  This indicates a fundamental knowledge of Billing and the person who says this to you quite probably knows what they are talking about.  Bob and co, stumbling about in the dark, won’t start from the root, they will start from the point in the cycle that they know best; in the way that a bathroom salesman, asked to build a house, might ignore its foundations and start with the tiles.  Only when the system cannot be rolled out to countries and business units beyond their ken and some kludge workaround has to be incorporated does their lack of knowledge (and your problem) surface.

To be a Black Arts practitioner you must be a seeker of the one thing. Remove the forest and the trees around you and look for the roots of your task.  For example, mentally reduce all professional services companies to organizations that sell time.  Do not to be distracted by the fancy name they might give to the time that they are selling.  When working for product companies get straight to the heart of who they are by asking what do they make, who buys it and why?  A practitioner will move on to considering how products are made only after understanding why they are bought.  This way they avoid thinking that adding expensive frills to a product that is bought because it is cheap is a good idea.

If you wish to be successful in a domain you and not an expert in then look for the man or woman who can define the essence of the task at hand.  You will know you have found them when they tell you that it all comes down to understanding one thing…

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• How can you capture and record application errors in a robust manner?
• What information do you need to capture in order for for Developers to correctly diagnose the root causes of application errors?
• How often are these errors affecting your end users?

And the list of common sense questions goes on, yet very few of us actual implement scientific fault logging and management best practices into our applications.  Without some scientific data to guide your Developers towards producing better applications, you have not closed the loop in terms of building and managing deployed software.

So, say Hello to our  integration between Gemini and the truly fantastic Gibraltar software from the guys over at eSymmetrix, Inc.  Some official words:

Gibraltar works with Gemini to provide an elegant, streamlined workflow for finding and fixing bugs in your applications. Every error automatically reported and intelligently processed. Gemini cases opened only for application versions you care about and each case assigned the appropriate project, area and priority.

Watch the integration video and see how Gemini + Gibraltar will really help your team deliver world class applications built and managed the right way.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzVMsrG7Q5o

More material on this integration will be made available shortly, but here are some useful resources to get you going:

• Integration introduction video
• Gibraltar + Gemini feature page
• Gibraltar product information
• Blog Post on Defect Tracking and Gibraltar

Take some time out and use the above resources to see how you can get your teams to improve their software development and ultimately, the end-user experience.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GA-pG6vi3c

Best viewed full screen and in HD format.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7YdSkg-mew

The video is best viewed in full-screen HD.

Here’s the direct YouTube video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7YdSkg-mew&hd=1

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So what’s all the fuss about?  Put simply, Gemini add-on’s like Desktop and Visual Studio allow you to select an issue and use a stopwatch style time recorder:

Essentially, you select an issue and then start the clock.  You can pause time recording when your interrupted.  If you lock your workstation when you are away from your desk, time recording is automatically paused.  Neat.

The stopwatch will continue until you press STOP and commit your time log:

Pick your time type, put in a descriptive comment and that’s it.

It’s not rocket science, but the impact of this simple feature has even take us by surprise!

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When we designed our test management software TestRail, it became apparent that an integration with bug trackers and project management tools like Gemini was a critical feature to improve the workflow between software developers and testers.  So we were very happy when we learned that CounterSoft decided to support and help us with such an integration. The result of this cooperation can be seen on our website explaining how to integrate TestRail with Gemini.

TestRail with Gemini

So what exactly is TestRail? TestRail is our comprehensive web-based test case management software.  TestRail helps testers, developers and team leads to efficiently manage, track and coordinate software testing efforts, all from a centralized and easy to use web application.

I invite you to give TestRail a try and test the Gemini integration.  You can either download TestRail for a local installation or request a hosted trial. We are also happy to announce that Gemini customers are eligible to a 20% discount on new TestRail licenses; just contact our Customer Services about this.

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To hide meaning from the minds of the feeble, practitioners of The Black Arts have been known to rely on cryptography.  Ask anyone who has looked at one of those crazy Gantt charts that need to be wrapped around four walls what any of that stuff means; some of the things that PMs do are quite unintelligible!

The equation above relates to the fact that there is very little in life that benefits from the addition of politics.  P + X will usually give X-, or in other words, if you add a political dimension to any endeavour the end result is invariably damaging to said endeavour.  Think about the addition of politics to sport, religion or industry and you start to get the picture.  What we are about to look at is a deliberate warping of the environment so that we can achieve a minor miracle, where P + X gives X+.

Black Art practitioners are no mere mortals who struggle to wield the power of politics in an effective direction and so end up damaging their cause.  Here we shall reveal their most closely held secret: to be good at politics so that you can use it as an effective tool, you only need to know what politics is.  Politics, as defined by master practitioners:

Politics: The art of war against another individual or group of individuals without the open declaration of hostilities and preferably under the banner of peace and friendship.

Now that we are clear on what the objective is we can work out how to achieve it.  There are 3 simple stages to winning the political battle…

Stage 1 – Prepare

The uninitiated think that this means having all of the project documentation to hand and mastery of facts like the number of change requests since scope was first determined and the extent of the cost overruns. This is information for weaklings; of course we don’t expect you to be counting your ammunition in the face of your foe! By prepare, we mean spend a lot of time telling everyone that you are a straight-talker who is not interested in politics, only in achieving the goals that were clearly set at the start of the project. Build a reputation for detesting politics. It’s not hard, you just have to say it enough times and people will start to believe you even though it is a downright lie.

Stage 2 – Deliver

This is where all your preparation will prove its value.  Begin all your politically sensitive statements with words along the lines of: “as you know, I’m not into politics…” Remember too that this is the most politically explosive statement to be on the receiving end of.  Basically it translates into “I am about to pull this trigger right in your face but I am innocent of any crime because I know no better”.  Once you have delivered this jaw-dropping lie make your statement and brazen it out.  No matter what banana skins your ‘opponents’ might strew in your path keep reciting the mantra and rebutting their statements with comments like “well, that all seems very politically motivated…”.

Stage 3 – Retreat

Many an inexperienced practitioner falls down at this next stage because they cannot resist the temptation to wallow in victory.  Remember, your opponents are not passive, give them time and they will work out how to defeat you.  The secret of success is to have both the problem and the solution that you want in your possession.  Lay them on the table as the non-political option and then defeat any attempt to move to a different option by creating work for your opponents as a condition of movement on your part.  You will want to have such lines to hand as “well, I suppose that could be considered if you would care to document your requirements for us all to consider”.  Who, apart from Project Managers, is ever prepared to document anything?  Or, “we could re-scope the project to take that into consideration but you would have to provide us with a written budgetary framework to operate within otherwise it could prove too costly”.  You’ve got them again with “written”!

So, remember politics can be the friend of the Black Arts practitioner, and if you are a Project Manager, that means you need to secretly treat everyone else as the enemy.

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Before we go any further; a warning. You already know the things that are in the Black Arts Handbook, just as you would know about gravity even if you had no word for it.  These things we will tell you about were always there, you just had to open your eyes and ears to see and hear them.

Secret Art #1 : The Power of Numbers

It is a natural human instinct to avoid risk and the way to do that as a Project Manager is to slice, dice and scope your project into manageable chunks.  That is all very well but such activities confer no power on the Project Manager.  At the same time as you chop the project up into tasks and activities you must focus on the big picture, and the one thing about it that confers near magical powers upon you – the number!

If something is worth doing then it is usually because there is a commercial value in doing it.  Many Project Managers ignore this, look instead for some fuzzy, altruistic goal, and therefore lose their place in the big picture and the power that accompanies ‘big picture knowledge’.  Here’s an example of what we mean by the power of the number: when the Development Team Leader wants to block your access to his best DBA you need to be able to slap him over the head with the size of the number you are carrying around in your back pocket.

“This is a $50 million project and you want to put some junior DBA on it?”

See?

Do you see how powerful that statement is?

“You want to jeopardise $50 million” is a far more powerful statement to make to your Team Leader/Director/Manager than “we’re running behind schedule and could really do with some help here”.  Why is this so?  Well, the answer is simple, so simple that as we said right at the start, you already know it.

The “number” is the modern-day equivalent of the King’s Seal.  In the old days Kings would get the Barons to obey their instructions, conveyed by an emissary who might otherwise have found himself headless, simply by giving said emissary the royal seal.  The number, in today’s parlance, is the seal!  Don’t avoid it; rather seek it out, the bigger it is the better it is for those who know its uses.  A big number could only have been generated by, and is the property of, the most powerful people behind the project.  Knowing the number and carrying it around, makes you their emissary and anyone who messes with you messes with them.

Remember to always treat the number as if it is your responsibility to deliver it.  It is yours, the precious… it calls… it promises everything…

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