How can you tell how efficient your software development/migration process is?

It might be interesting to develop a set of metrics that capture the amount of time and steps involved with doing certain common activitives on a development effort.  A simple but I think effective measurement might be what is involved with adding a data-driven, context sensitive drop down list to a WinForm or WebForm.  This would involve steps similar to the following:

• Adding the data source to populate the drop down
• Adding the field to be controlled to the data base
• Getting the source from your source control repository
• Modifying the data transfer objects to get the selected value between the database and the control
• Modify the user interface to add the control
• Checking in the changes
• Add some sort of help documentation
• Develop any required tests
• Migration to the three typical environments (Dev, Stage, Prod) for both the application code and database objects.

Come to think of it if this process was captured (even without any metrics) it would go a long ways for developer documentation.

I really like this quote from "Verizon" I think it would be a great tag line for my company but Verizon might not like it too much.

So what does it mean to make progress every day?  On a software development effort progress can be measured in two distinct areas:

1. Progress building your software product
2. Progress adding features/functionality to that software that helps achieves the business goals.

Chances are your company wants to focus on the second of these two points, since they are not generally in the business of writing software for the sake of writing software.  This doesn't however say that the first item is not important.  Actually the efficient coder knows that building a solid foundation early on in the project will pay huge dividends once work begins on the actually functional requirements of the system.

Let's look at an analogy of Race Cars.  The object of building a race car is to be able to go fast and complete/win races.  However to do this there are a number of factors that contribute to the ability to go fast and complete/win the race.  Going fast there really needs to combine performance, safety, measurement and control. 

With most software development efforts, man-hours is the most significant expense in building a system, also time to market with respect to your competitors may also be an important factor.  Therefore it seems obvious but the quicker you build your system, the better off you will be.  Stating that however there is a real difference between speed and progress, if you are going real fast in the wrong direction or quickly building a system that is ripe with defects you may be going real fast but not making much progress.

To make real progress you need the right people, process and technology as well as management that understands that when development effort begins a significant effort will be in place to work on a foundation that may not have many visibile deliverables beyound the development team.  Then once the visible deliverables start to be created, they will come at a very rapid pace and of a higher level of quality.

Either I've got my mind into building the race car (building the tools and the infrastructure) or racing the car (building the actual application).  Working on these two different areas require a different mind-set and what I've found is if I spend a greater amount of time building an efficient race car, the faster it will go once I start the race.  The down side here is that if the car was built to race on an off-road course, but it needs to be ran on a paved oval course, I've probably wasted a lot of time and won't have a car that will perform very well.

My continous integration environment is coming along nicely.  I currently have five projects integrated...3 web sites, 1 VB Outlook Addin Application and 1 Compact Frameworks Application.  The most advanced project I have in place is a web site that uses the following script:

To summarize:

1. First the Team Foundation Server source control repository is checked to see if any files are updated.
2. If files are updated, then CruiseControl automatically gets all the files from the source control repository.
3. MSBuild kicks off and builds the class libraries and web site.
4. NUnit tests are ran against the class library
5. MSBuild kicks off a Web Deployment Project to update the staging server and change the connection string keys in the web.config file.
6. Last but not least functional test are kicked off through a NUnit test that executes WATIR test scripts

This is working excellent!

Over the last couple of days, I completed a first version of a Continous Integration environment.  If you are not familar with what Continous Integration is, I would recommend an excellent podcast from Scott Hanelman.

I have a dedicated build machine setup that will be hosting two environments for performing build & tests, I'm going to test

• Built In build server from Team Foundation Server
• CruiseControl.NET a product from ThoughtWorks

I had installed the Build Component with TFS a while ago, configured it to run builds and this seemed pretty cool, but haven't spent too much time on this.

The CruiseControl.NET environment I created is fairly basic, but I was able to get it up and running within about an hour.  Here is a summary of what is currently in place.

• CruiseControl.NET runs as a service and is configured with ccnet.config file.
• Within ccnet.config, I created a project that looks at source code within my TFS repository.
• When I check a file in to the TFS repository for the project I created, it get's all the source code under the node specified in the ccnet.config, then runs a task to kick off a build with MSBuild.
• A small application can be installed on our development machine that runs in the tray that allows you to check the status of builds, it also gives you notifications of when builds are completed or they break.
• In addition there is a web based dashboard that will give me a report of the latest builds.

I'm extremely excitied about using additional features that will allow for unit testing and functional testing as well as deployment.  I'm going to compare the Microsoft TFS offerring with the CruiseControl option.  In theory, if I build these both around the the MSBuild tool, I should be able to have similar build processes in both environments.

What experiences have you had with continuous integration or similar technologies?

Upgrading from Beta 3 refresh of TFS to RTM, was as painful as I expected (but probably my own fault).  With great hopes, I downloaded the Team Foundation Server Upgrade Package and faithfully followed the steps within the document. 

The first thing I learned when applying the update was the Beta 3 Refresh of TFS was incorrectly installed.  I purchased a server off of ebay to have a dedicated machine running this software, however when I installed SharePoint services, I missed the step to install it with the "Server Farm" option.  This created a named instances of SQL Server independent of the SQL install hosting TFS.  When the TFSUpgrade utility attempted to apply the updates to the SharePoint databases, it failed since the upgrade was looking in the default instances.  I moved the databases from the SharePoint instance to the default instance, and I think that was the cause of most of the problems.

To make a long painful story short here are the next steps I did to complete the effort...

• Ensure I had backups of all the databases involved (before and after I ran the TFS Upgrade Utility).
• Uninstall Beta3 refresh of TFS
• Attempted to install the RTM version, got SharePoint errors (stmadm.exe did not return zero)
• Attempted new settings in SharePoint for "Default Config" db, as well as the "Content DBs" for virtual servers.
• Uninstalled SharePoint, reinstalled with Server Farm option selected (this allows for TFS to manage the database configuration).
• Attempted to install RTM version again, got similar SharePoint errors.
• After trying different combinations, looking at the data within the STS databases, after about 4 hours I decided to just rebuild the box install TFS from scratch.
• This went well, everything worked as expected and within about 1.5 hours I went from a formatted hard-drive to an up and running TFS server (probably would have been quicker, but this is an older PIII Xeon @ 1.1GHz)
• For the moment of truth...I restored the backups of all my databases...DOH, when I rebuilt the box, I had thought hmmm, it was named SLNETPSQL3 before, let's name it SLNETTFS this time...big mistake!!!  After I restored, all the data referenced the name of the original server SLNETPSQL3, I probably spent about an hour or two attempting to figure out how to change everything over, but no luck...
• Decided to just go ahead and rebuild it one more time, this time with the original server name.  Again about 1.5 hours later I had a fresh install of TFS with everything working just fine.  I made a copy fo the original DB's.
• Next I attempted to restore the original DB's, at soon as I did this, I couldn't connect to TFS with any of the users.  So at at this point, I had about 20 hours into the upgrade and needed to get some work done to pay the bills, so I decided to just restore the databases from the fresh copy that I knew worked.
• I was in business, then I just restored the versions of my production TFSIntegration db to a different name, copied the tables tbl_projects, tbl_security_projects & tbl_security_objects for those projects into my new database.
• At that point, my projects came on line.
• I restored the TFSVersionControl database and all my source history got restored YIPPPPPEEEEE!!! (I had off-line backups of the source, but it was nice to be able to keep the source history)
• Next I had thought, ok let's get the work items in there...no luck here, there is data in the TFSIntegration database that needed to be tied to the data within the work items db, so this did not restore to work with my new version of the projects in the TFSIntegration DB.
• I tried for about a couple of hours to manually import the tables, but ran in to some F-Key violations that stemmed form the work items not being created for the projects (I think I know what I need to do to restore these, but again need to get some real work done to pay the bills, probably do another post when I get this completed.

Anyway - things are all well, I have a couple of legacy TFS projects that are limping along but useable non-the-less.

Has any one else had similar experiences?

*Note - Although my experience documented here wasn't too "pleasant" it is probably due to my lack of my prior knowledge on TFS configuration and architecture and learning on the fly.  This was an excellent learning experience and the more I learn about the capabilities of this product, the more I like it!

I recently came across an interesting tool for looking at source code metrics SourceMonitor from Campwood Software.  This tool looks at source within a set of sub-directories and gives you basic measures about your software.

The following are a sample of measures captured through this application:

• Total Source Lines
• Total Statements
• Percentage of documentation
• Complexity
• Block Depth

A very interesting chart is the summary one below; this gives you an idea of how well your source fits within a predefined set of measures.

When developing software, you need great strategies and tactics to succeed.

You may have an excellent vision on what you want to get to and a well thought-out approach; however if the developers writing the code mess up the implementation or don't follow the requirements your strategy will be meaningless.

On the other hand you could have the most experienced hardworking developers working on your project.  If they get sent in the wrong direction based upon a faulty strategy either due to lack of experience, lack of experience with the technology, requirements that aren't clear, picking the wrong technology, methodology or incorrect architecture your project could be in real trouble.

Finding the right combination of strategy and tactics can be a challenge, however once the balance is achieved, your project is almost guaranteed to be a success!

Some companies look to technology to achieve this balance however this can truly only be found through experience and/or an effective mature process.

In most cases projects fail or fall short of expectations due to strategy type issues.

Visual Studio .NET 2005 provides a very powerful frameworks for performing web testing.

Here are some tips to make the most out of these features:

• When creating controls on your forms, make sure each control gets an ID even if these controls get created dynamically.  This will give a consistant name for checking fields on post-backs.  If you don't do this VS.NET generates a name like ctl00.  If you move things around on your page, this may become ctl01 and your test will break.
• Besure to take advantage of Context Parameters, these allow you to quickly define constants to be used across tests.