You can use this link to register for the joint Microsoft-Osellus Webinar on software development governance. Omid is going to be talking about a lot of things that we have been able to achieve with the collaboration between the osellus process toolset/service offerings and the VSTS integrated ALM.

Here is a preview of what we will be talking about:

Effective governance aligns your software development investment with your business strategy. By ensuring continuous traceability of software development activities, governance leads to enhanced customer satisfaction and compliance with internal and external policies.

While most organizations use some measure of implicit governance, the full potential of a governance framework can be realized by taking three practical and explicit measures. The software development processes in the organization need to be selected and tailored in a manner that supports organization’s business goals. These processes need to be enforced in a streamlined manner. And, they need to be monitored to ensure corrective actions are taken in a timely manner.

In this webinar we outline a practical approach to establish software development governance in an automated yet flexible manner. We will discuss how the business objectives, standards and control mechanisms in the organization should be mapped to process elements such a roles, activities and work products that guide practitioners in a non-intrusive manner. Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and the IRIS process automation suite from Osellus will be used to demonstrate implementation of an effective governance framework in real-world scenarios.

David had this to say (quite disdainfully ) about my theorizing about getting data out of Jazz into MS Excel and MS Project:

Instead of a one-way data transfer from Jazz to Microsoft documents, I think a much more useful exercise would be to extend MS Office to make it Jazz aware. This would allow the Office applications to behave as Jazz clients much like Microsoft and others have done for VSTS. Without Jazz awareness, I feel that these other applications would be limited to reporting functions and be of little use to the project management community.

I see this more as an exercise in extending MS Office (or your application of choice) rather than extending Jazz and can understand why IBM would be looking for partners to provide such a solution for their customers.

Point is good. Point taken. I am doing precisely what Negin was complaining about - missing the project management perspective and looking at it from the developer’s perspective - but I did fool myself for a bit there that I had the answer signed, sealed and delivered.

The project manager would rather work directly from inside MS Excel, MS Project and interfaces she is familiar with - and it is far fetched to expect non-developer stake-holders to log into a Jazz client/web client and export into Project or report into Excel.

Also, Work Item information (for example) could be changing frequently and direct integration into MS Excel and MS Project provides an opportunity to refresh statuses and other work item information directly from inside a report that the project manager has open compared to having to export repeatedly from inside a Jazz client each time.

Not to fear. As with the Jazz-based solution I outlined yesterday, I have a similarly vague outline of how to do this - atleast for Excel:

As mentioned in my previous post, we already have a way to get the data off the Jazz server.

Microsoft has made it equally easy to develop applications that target the Office ecosystem through VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office - currently VSTO 2005). This means that we have application level add-in support for Office system applications like MS Excel.

Through VSTO, I can write a plug-in for Excel that puts a Jazz toolbar/ribbon in Excel and interfaces directly with the service interface of the Jazz Server to get the raw data required off Jazz. This VSTO plugin would then take care of the business logic of putting together and rendering different reports and charts based on pre-defined queries by leveraging the runtime support in MS Excel that VSTO allows.

Reverting to the developer perspective for a bit, VSTO is installed as an add-on on Visual Studio and provides very nice design-time support - just like Win-Forms controls. Makes it that much easier to develop these plug-ins.

Depending on the needs, in case we find that the Jazz service interface is too ‘raw’ for consumption, another option would be to have the Excel VSTO plug-in interact with the Jazz server through a custom Jazz service-plugin that takes care of sending the Excel plug-in well filtered and formatted data. This has some obvious advantages but in my opinion, has the decisive disadvantage of mandatorily requiring a Jazz server side plug-in without which the nice MS Excel plugin we developed will not work.

The part I am not sure about is how to implement a similar VSTO plug-in for MS Project. If I remember correctly, VSTO doesn’t offer support for MS Project development. I could be wrong.

Browsing the VSTO site is becoming a pain right now because I am on a train back to Toronto that has wifi access on board - but connectivity is sporadic at best. I’ll check up a little later and update this post. If it does have support, that’s that.
If not, a plugin can be written directly against the MS Project SDK to achieve our end.

[Update] There seem to be a couple of options for developing MS Project plugins:

• The version of VSTO that comes integrated with Visual Studio 2008 (currently in beta) has support for creating MS Project plug-ins.
• I guess you can create a COM add-in for MS Project using the MS Project SDK I mentioned above but that would be something to consider only if I couldn’t use VSTO.

Brian announced the first CTP for Rosario.

Congratulations to all practioners who worked on this !

Microsoft has just unveiled Silverlight.

“Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web.”

For product companies that rely on rich interactive applications in their tools/services this is a significent development and I am sure they are are going to closely follow the details being released by Microsoft over the next few weeks.

There were 1548 attendees at the SEPG event this year. Most of them are involved in some kind of process - definition, management or improvement - activities in the organizations they represent. Many of the visitors to the Microsoft booth were already aware of advanced process-specific capabilities introduced by Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). This was a good opportunity for the partners in the VSTS eco-system to showcase their offerings in this area.

For Osellus this meant highlighting IRIS Process Author with its collaborative, enterprise-grade process architecting capabilities. The feedback received from visitors to the booth was a good validation of the single-minded focus we have in providing a team-based un-complicated way to author or tailor processes. Our methodology-agnostic approach means we support processes based on homegrown methodologies or well-known methodologies and frameworks such as MSF, RUP, Macroscope, EssUP, ITIL and others. To give you an idea of the change I noticed in this domain, I never once had to say that “one process does not fit all projects”! This is a given. All I had to do was show how this can be done in a low-cost, collaborative team based environment. Oh and by the way, using IRIS Process Author, the cost of creating VSTS Process Templates is almost zero as we support out-of-the-box generation of these templates ! I had a lot of questions on how these processes, once modeled are consumed. This was a good plug for me to show our second-generation enactment solution.

It seems that the days of a single monolithic dominant methodology are truly over as users realize that these printed tomes or published websites are relegated as shelf-ware by most practioners in real projects. This is where the second generation tooling offered by IRIS Process Live comes into play. We have offered the first generation of this tooling for a few years now, and based on the lessons learned we have made a significant change to this tooling. Offered with an underlying platform such as VSTS, we have sucessfully bridged the gap between the theory around process improvement pattern of author-enact-measure-improve with actual tool based implementations in real projects. This would also deliver on the promise of data-based process improvement initiatives as well as help interested organizations in areas such as project simulations, project forensics and skills and competency improvement initiatives. Watch this blog for more information on this area over the next few months…

Here are some pictures from the conference:

From left to right: Serge (Fujitsu), Eric (Ivar Jacobson), Kamal (Osellus), Juan (Personify Design), Ajoy (Microsoft), Clementino (Microsoft), Chandra (Osellus)

Kamal, Chandra

Osellus is getting ready to showcase its second generation process automation suite IRIS and other related offerings at the upcoming SEPG show in Austin.

We are sharing the Microsoft booth to demonstrate our latest collaborative offerings around Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System. There is a lot of theory (around process automation) going into practice with this next generation toolware and I am very excited to share this advancement of art with the process pioneers attending this conference.

Here are our coordinates at the show:

Event:  SEPG 2007
Date: March 26-28th
Location: Austin, Texas
Exhibit: 515 - Sharing the Microsoft booth

I will be blogging about the show but in case you are in Austin, do come and drop by to say Hi.