Time tracking and timesheet software is becoming more and more popular nowadays for it has proved to be beneficial both for small and large companies, for the employers and employees. The market for timesheet software is quite various, so learning it can make one uncertain about what package to choose. To simplify the search, it’s wise to consider budget, business requirements and to approach a question seriously:

1. The first step is to prepare a list of the things you are going to use timesheet software for: billing clients for time recorded by your staff, communicating with payroll systems, enforcing labor policies, etc. Define the functions for which you already have a specific process or policy and decide whether you wish to change your policies to comply with the software or whether you want to pay a fee to customize the software to your policies.
2. Then surf the Web to look for timesheet software providers. Most will offer a free trial or at least an online demo, so you can see how closely the package matches your needs. Make sure you look at packages with processes and workflows for your type of business – buying the packaged version of software meant for your vertical industry helps avoid spending money on customization.
3. Don’t hesitate to contact vendors through the contact forms on their web sites in order to define weather their products are those required for your business needs.

Besides, you can ask others what they use and what they like and don’t like about their software, and look for software reviews on the internet. Considering a vendor you should also consider the things like customer support, warranties, upgrades (free or charged), the number of users, the license and customization fees, etc.

Agile development sounds great and gains more and more popularity. However, there is often a risk for an Agile project to go wrong.

When implemented well, Agile methods turn beneficial:

- they provide working software quickly;
- they give the customer the ability to change his mind routinely;
- they provide insight into the actual progress of the project.

But, there are at least three potential risks to consider before plunging deep into Agile:

• Agile methods are easily misunderstood.

  In fact, Agile comprises active customer involvement, responding to changes instead of following a plan, focus on individuals and interactions, releasing software early and often. Agile practices, like any other practices, are learned through example, application, and training. If the practices are disconnected from the philosophy, the result just won’t work.

• It’s easy to start thinking you are doing right, when you are doing wrong.

  Agile techniques require depth: the ability to know the right techniques for the current project, and the ability to choose between them. If make a team just throw away waterfall methods without giving them direction, it will result in devolving into endless code-and-fix process.

• Agile makes the process visible

  Agile allows watching the progress. If someone in an Agile workshop isn’t contributing, it becomes obvious in no time. For those used to complex, bureaucratic waterfall structures, which are opaque, this exact feature may look like a disadvantage.

But the main risk is that poorly implemented Agile methods can leave an organization in worse shape than when it started, with all the same problems, less documentation, and worse architecture.

Time management is a significant component of work over a project. Time tracking, though sometimes is considered to be a pain, in fact has plenty of benefits. Nowadays, finding an appropriate time tracking tool is not a problem, for there is a variety of choice. Good time tracking eases the life of clients and service providers, project manager and staff.

If we speak about software development projects, here are some of the benefits that time tracking may provide:

• Time-tracking helps bill clients and pay external consultants. Making clear time reports and providing them to the interested parties is much easier.
• An accountant will be able to generate more accurate financials because s/he will have the information to value work in progress. The accurate financials allows viewing company’s financial trends. Watching the trends allows to make decisions early, and not to end up in a cash crunch panic.
• Time tracking allows keeping tracks of team’s effectiveness and gives the information one may use in the future to estimate similar projects. It can show the areas where the staff isn’t being productive, so they can review their working habits and adjust them to to get more out of a work day in less time.
• It gives the clear view on the time your staff is spending on tasks, and how time is spent. That helps to monitor when your staff is in danger of burning out, or whether you need to expand or downsize your team.

So time tracking is not only about marking what was done, and how much time was spent on working on this or that task. One of the most important things is the possibility to identify which of those tasks were productive.

Not so long ago the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle team announced the release of Microsoft SDL Process Template for Visual Studio Team System. This new template is designed to work with TFS 2008 and makes writing secure code much easier. The new SDL template has a solution that reduces the barrier to entry for SDL adoption, provides auditing for satisfying the security requirements, and helps demonstrate security return on investment.

There is a short overview of its options:

The Process Guidance page provides a security owner with five steps for Getting Started on an SDL project, and details on customizing the template and extending it for third party security tools.

For developers, who care about security, but want it to be intuitive, the SDL Process Template includes check-in policies. These policies ensure every check-in of code is taking advantage of the SDL required compiler/linker flags and Code Analysis features already in Visual Studio. This will eliminate entire classes of security weaknesses from the code!

Testers want to be able to emphasize the importance of a security bug and properly communicate the impact to their product. The default “bug” work item now has customized security fields so one can identify security severity, and security cause/effect (using STRIDE), and mark a bug as “Blocking” or “Not Blocking.” This feature allows tracking and searching for security-specific bugs.

For the management team there are the Final Security Review Report and Security Bugs Report, which provide an auditable set of artifacts that details security work completed as well as deferred tasks.

Actually, the new SDL template addresses the challenge of making the code more secure. More deailed overview may be found here.

Well, while Visual Studio guys catch 2010 Beta 1 installation bugs and explain users how to deal with the problems, I’ll quickly go and have a look of what else future VSTS 2010 users may expect from it.

Frankly, I admire the VSTS team, for the work they’ve done about TFS 2010 version seems really fascinating. There’ve been lots of improvements and new features introduced in almost every Visual Studio area.

Here are some more, i’ve read about lately:

First, there are improvements in project management. Starting with Work Item Tracking, where there’s been introduced the ability to break down work items into hierarchies, custom link types allowing a user to define one of 4 link “topologies”:

• Network –Any two items can be connected and the link has the same name at both ends.
• Tree – A hierarchical link type that defines a “parent/child” relationship. A parent can have many children but a child can only have one parent of a given tree link type.
• Dependency – A directed graph where links connect work items but there can’t be a cycle.
• Directed network – kind of a half way type between network and dependency. There are no constraints on what or how many work items can be related but each end of the link has a unique name (e.g. Tests & Tested By)

Then, there come link queries and new links control. Moreover, there are a bunch of other work item control improvements in addition to the links control including HTML control, link labels, edit, and labels.

Field comparison and group membership queries have been introduced. In TFS 2010, work item query clauses can compare fields with each other, while in previous versions they could only compare a field against a constant. And it’s now possible to easily write queries that filter by groups of people. A new feature called query folders allows organizing queries into folders both under My Queries and under Team Queries. Further, under Team Queries, one can delegate permissions to the sub folders to whomever they like.

Then, some more project management features, including:

Successor/Predecessor – Now with the user definable link types, there’s a possibility to define a link type to represent successor/predecessor relationships and round trip them between TFS and project as well.
Rollups – The work was done to make the project summary tasks and the calculations that Project does round trip well with TFS.
Undo – One now can undo changes made in an MS Project workbook that is bound to TFS. In previous versions undo was disabled due to difficulty coordinating the undo across MS Project and TFS data.

There is also the introduction of 4 dashboards (Work Progress, Product Quality, Test Progress and Build Quality) easy to customize, improved excel services and new reporting features, and many more.

The detailed overviews are here and here.

There’ve been also talks about democratizing application lifecycle management. An emphasis will be put on better cooperation between business, development departments and test departments. Thus all the members of a development organization will be brought into the application development life cycle, and many of the existing barriers to integration will be removed.

MSDN has an awesome article on process templated in TFS. It covers how you can basically control all the work done within a team project.

A team project is simply a bucket that stores and partitions all of the artifacts you track and use during a development project.

The New Team Project wizard in Team Foundation Client (TFC) with lots of templates out there and ready for use can really streamline your projects.

Quite informative, do check it out.

Here’s a small preview:

MSF Agile Bug States and Transitions

MSF CMMI Bug States and Transitions

Conference on Adopting an Application Lifecycle Management strategy with Visual Studio Team System

Ahh, wish I could attend. =(

Well, for those of you who will be in the area on 18th November 2008 (Microsoft’s office Tower II, KLCC), you may sign up over here.

Quite a few companies are thinking of implementing a single development lifecycle management system that would facilitate planning, development, and project management all together. Looks like MSIT is already on their way of getting there. Recent TechNet Radio episode describes the company’s three-year vision to adopt Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation across the organization.

Quite a few companies are thinking of implementing a signle development lifecycle management system that would facilitate planning, development and project managememnt all together. Looks like MSIT is already on their way of getting there. Recent TechNet Radio episode descibes the company’s three-year vision to adopt Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation across the organization.

Sorry for linking to a post in which the author links to someone else, but this one is definitely worth it. It left me smiling, and I just couldn’t let it go unnoticed.

iDisposable blog post titled ALM Summarized links to Septermber SD Times article on Application Lifecycle Management suites, which, true, has a good thorough discussion of the essence of ALM.

One thing before I go further though is that ALM in my understanding is not exactly “any set of software packages that purports to encompass the entire Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC),” rather a concept much bigger than that. I mentioned this in one of my earlier posts, “The difference between SDLC and ALM?”

With the difference between the two being so significant, there’s no wonder SD Times found that “Not one of the software companies we’ve talked to claims to offer a totally complete ALM solution and they say that no one currently does.” The concept of ALM is too broad to be embraced by just one solution.

But there’s a catch, here’s a list of what ALM includes, according to the print version of the SDTimes article (that is missing in the electronic version):

* Requirements planning
* Visualization management
* Modeling
* Design
* Feature management
* Build management
* Configuration management
* Change management
* Project management
* Release management
* Testing/QA
* Deployment
* Monitoring and reporting
* Workflow
* Collaboration
* Team communication

Well, that’s quite extensive as it is. And I couldn’t keep from smiling at this: “Now that helps right? A little dose of clarity. Clarity: maybe one day we can get it in a pill and the world will be a better place.” Absolutely, clarity helps! =)