TechEd 2007: Presentation on Agile Software Development for small teams was a hit
There was a session I forgot to mention from my post yesterday, but that was one of the best. Here is the complete summary so you have an idea of what was covered:
DEV02-TLC - Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Small Agile Teams
Monday, June 4 4:45 PM - 6:00 PM, Blue Theater 13
Speaker(s): Will Stott
Everyone says that Agile approaches like Extreme Programming only work when you’ve got a small team of highly talented developers. I agree that Agile works best for small teams, but it’s not talent that really matters, it’s a willingness to adopt certain practices and values. Over the next forty minutes I want to explain how Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) supports the Agile practices and values that allow everyone in this room to create a top performing small team. Topics to be covered include: • The case for creating small Agile teams – how Agile provides a middle-way between having too much process and too little • Adapting the Team Foundation Process Framework – how to create a light weight process for a small Agile team doing Extreme Programming. • Setting-up Team Foundation Build – why frequent integration is important and how to implement practices like ‘Continuous Integration’ and the ‘Ten Minute Build’ with TFB. • Test-driven Development – demonstration of the new VSTS Tools in a Pair-programming session (James Newkirk / Will Stott) with particular emphasis on Refactoring and writing good programmer tests. • Customer Testing using Generic Tests and FIT – how functional tests written by Customers in a Word document can be run as part of an automated build process to verify that your code satisfies its business requirements. James Newkirk and Will Stott have written a book entitled ‘Visual Studio Team System – Better Software Development for Agile Teams’ (700 pages) which Addison-Wesley will launch at Tech·Ed 2007. This book is targeted at people who want to know how VSTS might be used by a small team transitioning to Extreme Programming and includes a series of exercises which take readers through the entire software development lifecycle from inception to deployment.
I arrived there on time, and there were already as many people outside as inside the presentation space.
You could actually see people standing on top of chairs to see and hear what he was presenting. Some people watched the whole presentation while standing up, which is quite a compliment.
Doug Seven replaced Jim Newkirk as a co-presenter, as his flight was late.
Will and Jim had just launched their new book (as mentioned in the summary "‘Visual Studio Team System – Better Software Development for Agile Teams". The companion site (where you can get a link to buy it from Amazon.com) is here.
As part of this work, Will and Jim released a new software process template for Visual Studio Team System, MSF for XP.
I will blog again at length about this book later. Right now I can tell you though that this is one of the best books that you could buy at this moment if you are planning to adopt an Agile method with Visual Studio Team System.
