So, we will move on for the other Common Fund project that we want to update you about, and that's the Genotype Tissue Expression Project, otherwise known as G-TEX, and Jeff Strewing is the lead for that at NHGRI, so turn it over to Jeff. Great. Thank you. I'll be telling you a bit about the Genotype Tissue Expression Project, so called G-TEX. This is a Common Fund project led by NHGRI and NIMH, Eric and Tom are our co-chairs. These are some of the lead institutes and lead program people. NCI is also a major contributor to this at the sample sort of collection and front end of things, but we've fortunately got very active participation from many ICs. It's been a really fun project. The overall goal of G-TEX is to establish a resource database and associated tissue bank in which we can study the relationship between genetic variation and gene expression initially in largely reference or non-diseased human tissues. The sort of grander goal is to collect up to approximately 1,000 postmortem donors in which we collect multiple tissues from each and measure gene expression the donors will be genotyped. It's funded as a two-year pilot project, really just to see whether this idea is feasible at all. Can we get out there and collect these tissues and get good quality samples from them? So in this two-year feasibility project, the specific aims are to enroll 160 postmortem donors that will be unselected for disease status. They'll have a smattering of common chronic disease. And then we need to show we can obtain high-quality RNA from these multiple tissues. We aim to collect really about as many as we possibly can, as many as is feasible, as 30 or more per postmortem donor. We'll be getting a kind of parallel series of surgery donors where we'll have a handful sort of four to five tissues that are routinely discarded after surgery as a sort of zero postmortem interval kind of comparison group. And the pilot will allow us to calculate at least cis expression quantitative trait loci. This is the sort of overall kind of data flow with the autopsy donors on the left and surgery donors on the right. So our goal again is 160, it's relatively broad eligibility criteria. Donors can be aged 21 to 70 at the time of death. Largely unselected for disease status.  But largely, we'll take most individuals. A blood sample will be drawn from each and we'll do the aluminum 5 million SNP chip on those and also attempt to establish a lymphoblastoid cell line. We'll be getting a skin sample that will undergo gene expression analysis, but we'll also attempt to establish fibroblastoids cell lines from them. And then collect the many other additional peripheral tissues. When we have permission for the brain, it will be sent in whole overnight ice to an NIH-supported brain bank. We'll get a small bit of cerebellum and cortex in the autopsy suite. The rest of the brain is then sent on for more specific dissection. One of the specimens will go for immediate histopathologic review. And this is a very important part of the whole project in that we'll have an expert pathology review and H&E slide available for every single specimen that undergoes gene expression analysis. All this is done at biospecimen source sites of the multiple aliquots that at the current moment are being fixed in packed gene tissue, preservative. One aliquot goes immediately to our laboratory data analysis and coordinating center, where they will extract the RNA and do all the laboratory analyses. If the RNA is of high enough quality, we'll do mostly RNA-seq-based gene expression analysis. Not incredibly deep, but we don't have unlimited funds. In fact, we don't have enough funds to do all the potentially sort of over 8,000 peripheral tissue samples that we hope to collect. We have a sort of wet biorepository which will coordinate the storage and histopathologic review. This is a very full slide, but these are sort of all the funded sort of groups. Again, all the tissue collection apparatus is coordinated and organized through NCI and SAIC Frederick through the Cancer Human Biobank through Carolyn Compton's Office of Biospecimen and Biorepository Research. We've made three awards for biospecimen source sites. One is NDRI out of Philadelphia. Most all the postmortem donors are coming through the National Organ Procurement Organization. These are the individuals who organize and identify people who can donate organs. So NDRI is working with both Philadelphia and Virginia Beach OPOs. All of our surgery donors, we have just one site. NDRI, they will come from Drexel University there in Philly or Albert Einstein College of Medicine. And we're funding an LC sub-study through NDRI as well to Laura Siminoff at Virginia Commonwealth University. Roswell Park Cancer Institute is a second biospecimen source site. They're working with their local OPO, the Upstate New York Transplant Service. And our third one is Science Care in Phoenix, Arizona. They're a whole body donation program that deals mostly in training, education, and research. They don't do any transplantation of tissues or organs, but they fall under many of the same sort of FDA and other kind of rules and regulations about screening donors. We have a wet biorepository at Van Andel Research Institute, and SAIC Frederick is kind of providing the kind of data coordination of the sample collection part of it. University of Miami has a supplement to receive the brains. They'll dissect out approximately 11 sub-regions that then go on to the Broad Institute, who is our laboratory data analysis and coordinating center, where really essentially all the molecular work, the gene expression analysis, and the basic CISQTL analyses will be coordinated. We've made five R01 awards for statistical methods development for this relatively unique data of having gene expression on multiple tissues from the same donor. The NCBI will provide both a sort of a database of the EQTL results from GTEX and other EQTL human studies, and that will be where the controlled access data is made available as well. A pretty complicated structure, all of this is done through contracts. These are grants here. As I mentioned, we have a relatively small LC sub-study. We're thrilled to have Laura Siminoff leading that. Their goal really is to sort of understand the factors that affect consent to tissue donation for GTEX so that we can make what we hope will be a scale up an even better situation and just improving the informed consent process in this postmortem setting all around. We've got a website on genome.gov that's more oriented to the public. Kathy Eng, the program analyst here at NHGRI, has been really helpful in getting that set up and getting that content in there. As I mentioned, one sort of important and relatively unique part of this is that every specimen in this that will undergo molecular analysis will also have an expert pathology review. This is just a picture of some skeletal muscle from one of the early cases. We did some of the early cases where we collect everything in four preservatives, including formalin, which is the typical preservative for clinical pathology labs in this pack gene tissue. The pathologists basically love this pack gene tissue and it really gives H&E images that are as good or better than the formalin. And in fact, for these early cases at least, we're going only with this fixative because it allows us to simplify the collection quite a bit. This is a very complicated collection in an autopsy suite where you have to get many, many hundreds of labeled vials with exactly the right tissue and exactly the right amount and in preservatives and lots of things recorded. This is Carolyn's group of pathologists who are reviewing all the slides. We made awards the end of last summer. End of August was our biospecimen source site awards. It took us roughly six or seven months to kind of get all the protocols in place and really sort of begin to get our feet wet from December through early in this year, we did what we called alpha experimental protocols again where we collected four aliquots into each of four different preservatives, the pack gene tissue RNA later, snapfrozen and formalin. Then we moved to the beta sort of protocol phase where they're relatively stable. We're still tweaking things a bit but everything is now going into the pack gene fixative. We had our first in-person meeting with our external scientific panel in the first week in June and we've been in the field for five or six weeks then and I think we had sort of three donors by then. There was a bit of concern then. Fortunately, our enrollment has gone up dramatically since then, it's really a credit to the biospecimen source site. These are incredibly professional groups that are accustomed to dealing with families at this time of crisis in approaching them for consent for tissue donation and organ donation and do some research protocols. This one's more elaborate and more extensive than what is typical but we've since sort of bent this curve. This is just sort of a blow up of these first few months but later in June then we had five donors. We had nine in July and we've had 15 in August. So we've sort of bent that curve and really I think many of us have breathed a big sigh of relief that the sort of donor enrollment has really sort of kind of taken off. I mentioned the donor characteristics of 21 to 70 and such they had to have a BMI less than 35. We let a pretty broad range that the autopsy had to start within 24 hours of death. The vast majority of these have been much earlier than that and in fact many of them are less than 12 hours or six hours or less. This shows some early and all this is really preliminary data. This shows some of the molecular sort of quality data. On the y-axis here is the RIN number, the RNA integrity number. This is a sort of surrogate for quality. This goes from zero to 10. The higher number the better. Generally things in the five, six or certainly seven in above range are gonna generally give you a very good gene expression results. These are the first I think 26 donors that met the eligibility criteria. So each of these points represents an individual organ and the RIN value for that organ. The symbols in sort of the blueish green, there are individuals who are solid organ donors. So these are individuals that generally would have been on life support on a ventilator sort of and declared brain dead or cardiac death there. They then provide an organ, a kidney or something for clinical transplantation once that is completely finished. So all the clinical tissue and organ donation proceeds before anything related to GTX happens. They tend to be lower post-mortem intervals but basically you're seeing that with the exception of a few donors where many of the tissues are not very high quality that we've really got the majority of donors with median RINs well above six which is our semi-arbitrary sort of cutoff. I think that the molecular quality is looking quite promising early on. This is essentially the same data just sliced in a slightly different way. Again, the RIN number on the y-axis here, now I'm showing the various tissues that we're collecting. You can see it's a very broad range of organs, pretty much all the internal organs and such. So each dot here now represents one individual for which tibial nerve was measured and this is the RIN value. Everything with the BB at the end of it are the tissues that are processed at our brain bank and then set on to the LDAC. Almost all of them are yielding very high quality RNA. Some of the organs that we'd certainly like to study or sort of have had some of the lower RIN values, particularly liver, that's the one where there's almost as much existing human data on sort of single tissue existing in the literature and publicly available. Those haven't been generally all that great but I think we're gonna have many, many organs representing a range of tissues and histology and things that are gonna give us really quite good values. The data analysis is the initial processing and everything is being done at the Broad, led by Gatti Getz, but David DeLuca has been very instrumental in coming up with a sort of customized fire hose analysis pipeline for the RNA-seq and integrating all this to get to the point to be able to do an NEQTL calculation. You can see our statistical methods, our one investigators is an incredibly strong group. They attended, many of them attended our last meeting as well. So we've been having nearly monthly teleconference calls where this group gets together and talks about which reference sequence we're mapping the RNA-seq to and just so that everybody's on the same page about how the data's being generated and they're then poised to make best use of this unique data. We've really only got quite preliminary gene expression data. Most of these samples have come in in July and August and it takes a couple of months to get completely through the RNA-seq pipeline. We took some of the samples from those early donors where we compared the various preservatives because there's not that much known about RNA-seq with RNA-later or PAX gene tissue, but using AFI expression arrays that the correlation was really quite good between the same organs done with different CDNA library, perhaps in different preservative methods and the RNA-seq is not completely through the analysis, but it's looking very good as well. The sort of initial quality metrics for the RNA-seq look very good for PAX gene tissue. The Broad has done a fair bit of number of experiments with non-G-tex tissue looking at different CDNA library preps because we're getting sort of between 100 to one gram aliquots. A relatively small amount of that goes into the initial RNA extraction. We'd like to do this on much smaller input amounts in this DSN light, this duplex-specific nucleus-light CDNA prep looks to be really quite promising over a range of RIN values of RNA quality values and with pretty small input amounts. We're, I think, going to start with about a half a microgram, 500 nanograms, but it looks pretty good even down to the sort of 100 to 10 nanogram kind of input amounts. We do have a fair number of tissues now of real G-tex tissues that over a range of RIN values to still kind of put all this through its paces to get through the RNA-seq pipeline and that's just not quite available yet. But I think sort of in general, the donor enrollment now has kind of taken off where we're quite pleased with that. We may be able to get more restrictive to get even shorter post-mortem intervals to take those donors that give us even the best quality. Those solid organ donors are giving sort of the best quality. Unfortunately, those are donors that have been on a ventilator and the brain is generally not appropriate for analysis in those individuals. So it's a bit of a trade-off. The other organs we can get very quickly but we generally aren't collecting the brains, the whole brains on those individuals. All this data being a common fund community resource will be made available to the scientific community. The sort of final policies and everything are still being worked out but we imagine quarterly DB gap releases. The individually identifiable data will be behind controlled access even though in the post-mortem setting, this legally wouldn't be classified as human subjects research. Every either donor, if it's a sort of pre-decedent sort of consent or their necks of kin provide consent or authorization for this, they know about this data that we're doing genetic research and making it available to the scientific community. So it'll be in a DB gap like controlled access process. We'll make as much of it open access as we can a lot of the results. Some of the sort of non variant containing gene expression values we expect to be able to make sort of freely publicly available. And that will be through this website which is up now and you can sort of browse some of the existing EQTL data sets. There isn't any GTX data there yet. We have a very strong external scientific panel. Ross is on this panel. He's our council representative. And many of them are a number of them. I think actually more than half we're able to attend the last meeting. And these are the principal investigators of the various funded sites. These are incredibly professional teams at the biospecimen source sites. I'm thrilled to be working with them. Harold Magazine is the PI at Science Care. John Lonsale leads a big team at NDRI. Barbara Foster at Roswell Park. Greg Korzanowski leads the SAIC Frederick team that's coordinating all of this. Kristin Nardley and Wendy Winkler are the PIs from the Broad. Scott Joule from Van Ander Research Institute and Deborah Mache. Sorry, I miss typed her last name there. It should be Capital M obviously. Is the PI at the University of Miami Brain Bank. And I'll end there and take questions. So this is a really exciting initiative. I'm just, are you collecting, maybe I missed it, are you collecting as well-paired samples where possible while the individual is still alive related to the issue of not so much the degradation of RNA and all of this, but the presumably very aberrant expression patterns of all sorts of proteins or genes and proteins. Effectively not. So we're collecting no pre-decedent tissues on the post-mortem donors. I guess the donors that would be solid organ donors, these are individuals that generally are in intensive care units on life support. And it's usually a several day process of going through the steps to establish that there's no, that there's brain death and such. So those would be donors, I guess, where conceivably we could, we honestly didn't go down that path just thinking that it was already complicated enough sort of getting permission to collect all these post-mortem. The surgery tissues are, is it kind of meant to be something of a surrogate of tissues that will be subject to surgical and anesthetic changes that might occur. But these, so these will be tissues that have no post-mortem interval, certainly. And so this will be skin and fat and muscle and artery and nerve that are sort of fixed within minutes to an hour or less after. So they're not from the same people, obviously. Sorry, I've gone on too long. Was that Carlos? So will T-shirt resources also be made available for say creation of cell lines? I mean, one of the big questions will be how different is expression there from EBV transform cell lines, which is where we know what we think we know about EQTL. That's right, we hope to be able to, I mean, we're attempting to establish those. So we're, so the blood sample will be the source for the genotyping. We're putting some of it in pax gene to get RNA expression, and we're gonna attempt to establish EBV lymphoblastoid cells, exactly for that reason. We're also getting a skin sample that's sent on in media. So these are sent, you know, it's like immediately. So they're, I mean, this is like, it's a symphony to package and send all of these things. They go to many different places all in different temperatures, different. It's an undertaking. The skin goes directly as well for fibroblast and potential IPS cell establishment. That was the next question. Those have been really successful so far. So I think of the first 13 donors, 12 of the 13, we've established a fibroblast cell line. One of them became contaminated and didn't transform. Of that same set of donors, I think only three or four of the EBV lines have transformed. The blood that's obtained post-mortem, now many of these were what I refer to as tissue donors. So these are people who have passed away or in a hospital, in a morgue maybe, or on their way to a morgue and people are approached, the families are approached to donate skin or cornea or things like that. So the blood is obtained from the subclavian or intracardiac. It's not incredibly cellular and it's sometimes several hours old. So we're hoping to get as many of them transformed as possible, but at least early on it's looking like that won't be quite as successful. And it'll be a resource that folks can, somebody could propose less genome sequence everybody, let's make IPSLs in three different ways. That's right, that's right. I mean, our external scientific panel told us sort of warn us that it would be, probably take us at least as long to figure out how to get the samples back out of the repositories and it's taken us to get them in. So I wouldn't, next year when I give an update, I'll be surprised if we have the processes completely in place to make them available. That's absolutely the intention or hope. Yes. I was curious at the high number that were tissue donors and just wondered about the, both pre and postmortem changes to the brain and that the majority of those with brain death have incredible brain swelling, no perfusion, et cetera. Are those samples usable? Generally no. So the people that are solid organ donors, the people who have been on a ventilator for usually more than a day before the cross clamping and the removal of the organs for transplantation, those brains we essentially are not sending on. We are taking, if we have permission, we're taking a portion of cortex and cerebellum, but though you're right. I mean, those, the brains are really not. Jeff, has there been any consideration of getting other members of the family, at least blood from other members of the families? It's been raised a time or two. We haven't gone down that path. Certainly something we could consider. I mean... It's always useful from a genetics point of view at least to have other family members. And, you know, obviously talking to these families is a very difficult and delicate issue, but if the family is together at that time and what you need is a blood sample, I don't think it would be that much, much more difficult to obtain. That would be certainly something to consider. I mean, one of the sort of blessings of it being a two-year pilot is that we're using it as that. We've learned a lot, obviously, just getting to this point. And so, you know, we'll have the opportunity to make alterations as we consider scale-up and hopefully adding many other kinds of molecular analyses to the existing samples and using the tissues for further, yes. Is there any restriction on the ethnic makeup or what is the current ethnic makeup of the samples that are coming in or how's that being dealt with? I don't have on the tip of my tongue the geographic sort of ancestral origin of the donors. We, there are no restrictions about racial or ethnic makeup of the donors. In fact, we chose the 160 in part, assuming that we would sort of take essentially all comers and that we would have enough of any one racial ethnic group to have enough polymorphic individuals. So it's a mixture. I know there are, I think, at least a handful of African-Americans in the first 30 or so donors, but it's essentially all comers. Great.


What do you think it sounds like when two robots fight to the death in an arena? How about this? What about when someone wants you dead? What about when you try something fun and new for the first time?  Because even with no gameplay, no graphics, and no context, when a player hears something like this, they're gonna feel something. If you want the player to get ready for an epic, noble space adventure, it probably sounds something like this.  I think the difference between a good game and a great game is, a good game does everything you wanted it to do very well. But in a great game, you really can't imagine getting the same experience from it if even one aspect of it was missing. And as an old school AC vet who loves the parts, the weapons, the missions, the stories, the characters, and the gameplay to death, I still honestly cannot imagine having the same impactful experience without the music. And I think one of the main ways from software was able to really make you feel and believe that you were a badass futuristic pilot, even when the graphics might not have been the best. Because the players felt like this. Every single armored core game has had a phenomenal soundtrack to complement it. And the armored core music producers somehow nail it every single game. Like I already showed you what the intro to AC2 was. The game right after that was AC2 another age. Now what do you think another age sounds like? Well, how about this? What about an AC game about the silent line? What do you think a game about that sounds like? The chief music composer at From Software for Armored Core is Kota Hoshino. And Kota knows exactly what your feelings sound like. And he knows how to trigger what you're feeling when the game needs you to feel it. And he's literally been making music for Armored Core since Master of Arena on the PlayStation 1. Virtually all the songs you just heard, this guy had a crucial role in composing them. And the crazy thing is, he can't even read music. He just feels it. And the studio kind of just trusts his judgment. And so far, his judgment has been f**king phenomenal. And the best part is, he's a bassist. I'm just kidding, that's not the best part, but that is the reason his music slaps. The best part though is really that Kota Hoshino is once again the music composer behind AC6. So all the music that you've heard in the trailer, in the story, in the boss fight. It's by the same guy who did every other Armored Core game. So I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that this game has the same soul as all the other ones. The same feeling, the same emotions that always make Armored Core, Armored Core, are going to be in Armored Core 6. He is too from software what Hans Zimmer is to Chris Nolan, or Joe Hisashi to Studio Ghibli. Kota is a musical genius. So to end the video, I'm going to share what is in my opinion one of the best songs he's ever composed. And I want to see if you can guess what that song was for in the game. When do you think it played? What sort of feelings does it evoke in you?  And just know that the man who composed this song will also be composing the music you hear in AC6. So I hope you look forward to it, thanks for watching. And as always, hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.


Our next presenter is Lola Ben Alon, whose 3 minute title is Integrating Earth and Building Materials and Methods into Mainstream Construction. Welcome Lola. The vast majority of modern buildings, like the one we're in today, are made of highly processed and often toxic building materials such as synthetic insulation, concrete and steel. Making and processing these building materials accounts for 50% of global energy, 20% of global energy and 40% of global solid works. Essentially, relying on these conventional building materials is draining our natural resources.  Earth and building materials made of soil, sand and clay are natural and medium-sized, and they are offering a waste-free, also known as cradle-to- cradle life-saving energy. They require less energy to be produced. They often lower energy costs of heating and cooling. And they provide much healthier and non-oxygen cleaning environment. However, despite their environmental advantages, Earth and building materials have not been comprehensively implemented because they are missing technical data. They are often perceived competitive as bloating, but can be mistaken as being soil. And they are not chosen in the building rules. To address these hurdles, my research aims to integrate Earth and building materials into MACE and construction materials into pretty critical steps. First, I'm developing a life-cycle system of Earth and building materials, developing their environmental impacts from the extraction of raw materials to their demolition and recycling phases. Second, I'm using the Perception Service to identify how can a medical perception be replaced. And third, I'm conducting policy repair processes that examines which improvements are necessary in Earth and building materials. These three critical steps contribute to the administration and justification of Earth and materials, helping policy makers in their efforts to advance Earth and building materials. Earth and building materials are offered to us by nature for free. They are all found in just under your feet. Let's use them. But for student research, my goal is to catalyze the broader development of the health care to low household environment by making modern, sustainable buildings natural. Thank you.


Hi, welcome to Visual Studio Toolbox. I'm Donovan Brown, your host, and today we're talking to Sandra about Combonboards. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So what do you do here at Microsoft? Well, I'm the program manager on the Combon team in Visual Studio team services and team foundation server. Okay, so what is a Combonboard and why would a team want to use one? Okay, so we'll start with the word Combon, right? That was introduced by Toyota back when they were trying to gain efficiencies in their production of cars, and so basically what the Combon board today does is it's an electronic board for teams to visually manage their work as it goes through the process, whatever that may be. Okay, so, but it was use in manufacturing for vehicles, what are we doing with them in software? I think sometime after Toyota really made it popular, a lot of other industries started realizing that the processes and the bottlenecks and inefficiencies that other industries face could be applied to the same type of tool or process or something. So we're using this board to be able to visualize the flow of our work as it starts from inception to being completed, right? Right, exactly. So I'm a certified Scram Master Big Scrum fan, and I actually use Combonboards as part of managing my teams, and one of the things I liked about them the most was something called a whip limit, right? Which is like work in progress. Can you talk to us a little bit about what work in progress is and why we would use it? Sure, so a lot of Combon is about making sure that the cycle time is low, so the inception of that work item into the development phase and then getting to the actual delivery to the customer, right? And work in progress limits really help you because they essentially set a way for teams to focus on the items that are actively in development instead of picking up something new. So a team will set a work in progress limit for their Combonboard, and if that team goes over the limit as in they're picking up new work before finishing else, something else, the board would let you know and say, hey, why don't you go finish that item, get it to delivery before you pick up something else? Got it, yeah, I used to have some really clever Scrum teams who would take on all this work, and they would burn it all down to one hour, and then they would go grab something else and burn that down to one hour, and by the end of the sprint, it looked like... Eventually you would stay back. Yeah, it looked like we burned a lot of hours, but nothing actually got done, and a whip limit would have forced them to, before you go and grab that other task, finish the task that are in there right now, right? Our board is able to do that. Yeah, absolutely. So why don't you show us what our Combonboard can do? Okay, sure, we'll just jump into the demo right here. So the first thing I wanna point out is the board lives under the work hub here, and I'll just go straight into full screen mode, and the first thing you'll see is the new column, or actually I'm gonna rename this into my backlog since that's really what it is, and the backlog column is there for the product owner. The product owner can go ahead and reorder and reprioritize this, and the team, what the team's gonna do is focus really on the work that's actively being worked on, right? And what they'll do is pick up the next item off the top and drag it into development when they're ready. And so that's very much a pull model, which is different from other past models which have been very much pushed. And so as soon as you drag something into development, you'll notice something about the development column that's a little bit different. It's been split into two sub columns that are doing and done. And the nice thing about the doing and done columns are that when something is in the done column, it lets the other rest of the team know visually that hey, I can pick up that work item and take it into verification, right? So that's an indication that I can pull it forward into the next column. Does the stuff in the done side affect my whip limit? The stuff in the done side will affect your whip limit, and the way that team members know that something is done is by actually looking at the definition of done, right? And that's something that a team can agree to and set a standard for. And so you'll know that for this work item, the work item's moved into this column done because it has a pull request and it's met all the criteria on the depth checklist. Okay. And then I can move it into the verification column once it's done. Okay, so why are some of them different colors? The colors are part of the styling rules, right? And we have a pretty strong, powerful functionality here in the settings cog over here that allows you to add styles to these different cards. And you'll notice I have three of them available here today. The one that you were pointing at, I believe, was the red card on the board. And that's actually for a P1 bug, right? That means it's high priority and so I really wanna get to it quickly. And what I've basically done is named it P1 bugs, added a color that'll really jump at you, right? So red. And then set it so that the rule criteria is if this is a priority one bug, then make sure that it shows up as red, right? And it's available here. I see. And then why are there two different, like there seems like there's two different lanes across there. Yeah, absolutely. The two different rows are called swim lanes and swim lanes allow you to group work across the same process, but separate features or maybe even higher priority items, right? And so in this example, we have it set an expedited column, right? And the expedited column basically tells the team, hey guys, this is something important, it's a P1 bug, make sure we pick it up. I see, so there's a lot of cards on here, potentially they could get lost in the shuffle, but by having these other lanes allows me to pull the important ones up so that they're focused on by my team. Yeah, and I can actually quickly show you that. So when we go into the settings cog here, you'll see one for swim lanes and we have our existing swim lanes already. I'm actually gonna add a second one for Microsoft Teams. My team just recently did a integration with Teams as you might have heard. Awesome. So we'll just add a swim lane here and I'm actually gonna go ahead and also add a column. I wanna go ahead and add a ready column. So you're free to customize like almost all the different aspects of this board to fit your team's current needs. Absolutely, yep. You can add permissions here and set it to team administrators, but yeah, it's really meant for the team to empower the team. Gotcha. So I'm gonna go ahead and add that ready column. I added the Microsoft Teams swim lane. We'll save and close and you'll see the board has now added a lane and then that column. And the reason I added the ready column is so that now instead of having this giant backlog where the teams, team members have to say, okay, is this backlog item meant for the Microsoft Teams value stream or is it should it be expedited? I can start dragging items with the teams tag here and prioritizing it in the ready column so that teams, my team members down the line can pick it up as it's prioritized. So this is almost like a lane where this is the stuff we've committed to delivering and this is the whole backlog of everything we're ever going to deliver. Yeah, and it's committed to delivering by the value stream, right, or by the feature. Okay, great. So what else can you show us about the board? I noticed it looks like there's like some SignalR icon or something up there. So what happens if I'm remote and I'm using this board? Do I get to see these changes in real time? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the SignalR that, what is it? Radio tower icon is meant to let us know that live updates are on. Okay.  Here is the Kanban board available in Microsoft Teams on the, what is it? Left or right hand side. And I'll pull this guy over, see, pull this guy over here and let's say I'm a remote member of the team, I'm attending stand-up via Skype, I can just go ahead and say, hey, you know, I picked up this card, I'm now doing it and you will see that card move over as well. Gotcha, and I see it actually automatically got assigned to you too because you're the person who took it over there. Yeah, exactly. I picked it up and I put it in active. Gotcha. Interesting. So what else, how else does this tie in? So we're talking about the Kanban board and we can see that it's integrated inside of Microsoft Teams, but because it's a part of Team Services, I assume it has linkages and traceability through other parts of it. Does it link to like branches or pull request or how does that start? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.  So you might have noticed that there's a couple of these like yellow breakdown components. So we'll go there first. I have the ability to add a child task and decompose my user story. It can be used as a really quick checklist. So maybe task one, task two. So that's one option, right? And then the next option is you can add a test or even create a new branch right off of the card that you're working on. Gotcha. Right. So here we've got some tests. So just one, test two, and you have the ability to then go ahead and run those tests. And this is linked to the test case hub in the test hub in VSTS. Got it. That's correct. Yeah, so being a DevOps guy, I'm kind of thinking what role this plays in a DevOps pipeline. And clearly this is up in the agile planning where we're actually deciding what it is we're gonna create. And then this is where we're defining the value that we wanna then flow through. So does this also integrate with our builds or a release in any way? Do I see these cards move automatically if a build is successful or a release deploys? Let me see, can I say it yet? I mean, we're in the process. We're working on some of that stuff. We're working on some of that stuff. It's definitely top of mind for us. So you'll see those things light up pretty soon, yeah. So where would someone go if they wanted to submit features for what they think your COM Bomb Board should be? Does that have any user voice? Yeah, absolutely. I'm definitely very active on user voice. And of course, if there's any issues or anything like that, they can reach out directly to me or there's the connect as well. Gotcha. So I'm just kind of curious, how does our COM Bomb Board stack up against other COM Bomb Boards out in the industry? I mean, how do we compare ourselves to some of our competition who I assume we're not the only one with COM Bomb Boards? How do we go about evaluating ours against others and how do you feel that we stack up against some of the other COM Bomb Boards? You know, I'm a little biased but I do think that the COM Bomb Board is one of our marquee experiences in Visual Studio Team Services. We've done several competes against, you know, the likes of Raleigh and even Jira to make sure that we're really, the feature parity is absolutely there. I think another thing that's nice is we've got a lot of customization and flexibility on our COM Bomb Boards, whereas others are very prescriptive. Okay. And so I think that's been like the highlight of the boards for sure. We're all about organizational alignment, absolutely, but then the teams have the autonomy to make sure that the board works for their process instead of just a standard for the entire project. So when you're looking at a COM Bomb Board, when I'm working with a lot of software development teams, there's so many different levels of the organization that are involved in turning an idea into a working piece of software. What level of your organization is using the COM Bomb Board? Is this something that your C-level exec is looking at? Is this something that your dev team is looking at? Like, who uses this? Is it actually able to be used by different areas of your organization? Yeah, you know, I think the COM Bomb Boards are the best for the teams themselves. If we take it up one step higher, we do have features and epics available as well if your organization is a little bit smaller in scale. So you can start creating COM Bomb Boards to manage your features and I'll actually flip over to that as well. So you'll see these are the user stories and bugs that the team is tracking, right? Then someone like myself or my manager, Aaron, I'm sure, you know, we might track features, right? And these are shippable increments that are really going out every three weeks for a sprint. So if I flip over to the Features Board, you'll see that I have a similar COM Bomb Board with different columns tracking the features that are then gonna go out to customers. And so, yeah, we do have the hierarchy available as well. All right, so these are the features who are the parents of the items we saw on the other board, gotcha. And I asked about things automatically moving. I'm just curious. So if I move all of the children user stories of a particular feature, does that feature then move across the board automatically or do I have to come over here and move it? No, however, there is an extension that we built through Microsoft DevLabs that does do that as far as like splitting. If once like an iteration is finished, you can go ahead and split the feature and move everything over to the next sprint. If it's not done or move everything to the done column. Right, so in our marketplace, we have tons of different extensions. And being a DevOps guy, I focus a lot on that inner part, right, the CI and the CD. And I know there's tons of extensions out there that I can install that enhance my build and enhance my release, but you're telling me that there's some of those extensions that also enhance our Kanban experience as well? Yes, absolutely, yeah. So there's actually an extension point available on the cards themselves. There's extension points available on the board. So one that I've seen that's pretty neat is the ability to print the cards and then have it on a physical board with QR codes, right, and you can actually gauge the movement across your electronic board as well as your physical board. So that's an interesting one. We also just released an open in Excel. And so you'll see that context menu item available there. So you can open a card in Excel. I know the main scenario for this really is to open a lot of results in a query and bulk edit them in Excel as well. Gotcha. So there's definitely like a variety of work related extensions available in the marketplace. Very, very cool. So tell me some other things about how, so you said like different organizations.  Maybe your PMs or your scrum masters or product owners, they might be using it here. But I also see that there's an Epic level as well. Does the hierarchy go to that level as well? Yeah, absolutely. So the Epics, and you'll see that breakdown too. So here you can tell that this Epic has one feature and that feature has been complete, right? Okay. And so these Epics generally last a lot longer. They're more longer lived artifacts, right? So they're not gonna have the same sort of constant flow as you might expect down at the user story level. But yeah, the more C level or the more strategic initiatives can be tracked at the Epic level. So I noticed that when I'm working on a really large application, there's multiple teams involved. And sometimes even multiple team backlogs that roll up. When you go down to the user story level, can each team have their own view of that combine board? Or is once you get to the user story level, everyone shares the same view of that combine board? Each team would have their own combine board. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they could customize it independently of the other teams on the organization. Yeah, they can customize it independently of the other teams. And then the nice thing is just through the linking, we have this ability to filter. And so of course there's like your basic core filters like assigned to, you can do at me and find the things that are just assigned to yourself or you can filter by iteration or work item type. But the one that I really like is the parent work item, which allows you to filter by the feature that the user story is associated with. Gotcha. And so when you're doing a stand up, you could say like, hey, here's this feature that we really need to get out the door, like what's going on and you can drill down here. So maybe this feature, right? Or you can go down to migrate legacy code and you can see the work as it's going across just for that specific feature. Yeah, it kind of gets rid of all the noise and lets you focus on one particular item. I also see a search icon that looks like on the far right hand side. Yeah, that's just a really quick search. You can do quick searches and a filter of the board. You actually have one available in your backlog as well.  So we have one there available as well too. Now, traditionally Kanban is associated with agile kind of methodologies. And inside of Team Services and TFS, we not only support agile and scrum, but also CMMI. Is that Kanban board also available for the CMMI template or is this only in? Yes, absolutely. It's available out of the box across all three templates and we're gonna support the workflows there as well. Awesome, so is there anything else that you wanna show us about this particular thing or have you touched on a lot of it? I think we've touched on quite a bit. I do wanna mention the tag colors are another thing that I've customized on this view. So blocked is not out of box red or anything like that. I've added that tag color and then teams is darker green and performance is a lighter green. The other thing I'd wanna mention is keyboard shortcuts. So if you just shift question mark, you have global keyboard shortcuts, but also shortcuts for the Kanban board. And that's really great because you can imagine like setting focus onto a single card and being able to move it up and down your board without really touching it around. Perfect, so I see the fractions up here and these are the actual whip limits for these particular columns. Are those soft or hard? What I mean by that is if I'm over my whip limit and I try to drag something, can it like bounce back to let me know that I'm over or does it let me go over my whip limit? No, we won't bounce you back, but we will give you- I might have to write that extension myself. Yeah, maybe. We will give you a nice little red indicator, right? So let's say I drop it into development, you've gone over your whip limit. So not only does the column title turn red, but you'll also see that you're a six out of five now and that you've been read. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Well, this has been an amazing tour of our Kanban board. So I wanna thank you so much for coming. I'm glad. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, no, my pleasure. So thanks for joining us here on Visual Studio Toolbox. We'll see you next time. Thanks. Thanks.


How is your relationship with vulnerability? Mine hasn't been great through my life because like lots of you, I have been vulnerable at times in trusting and had that taken advantage of that makes you once bit and twice shy. But to be a truly authentic communicator and human really, I think we have to find what is the appropriate expression of vulnerability in and through our lives. I'm gonna show you how to do that on my tour coming up in Australia soon called the Seven Levels of Authentic Communication one of which is how to be appropriately, skillfully, intentionally vulnerable so that we can enhance the connection and the engagement of those that listen to us, supporters, volunteer for us, vote for us, buy from us and so on, however you express your voice. Links in the bio, come and see me. I'll see you Australia very soon. Looking forward to it. Love you guys.