Power Toys for Visual Studio FY07 Goals
Last week Josh posted his Developer Solutions FY07 success factors draft and asked me to write-up the FY07 goals for the power toys. I worked with everyone on the team to ensure their personal goals and ideas were reflected below, so I'm proud to present a killer set of goals for the upcoming year.
Questions, comments, thoughts, ideas, and devil's advocates are always welcomed. Spam is not.
Deliver Great Developer Power Toy Solutions
Over the next year, we’ll continue to deliver great power toys as Shared Source releases, addressing developer pain-points and providing great serviceability tools.
- Provide 5 power toy solutions for FY07
- Establish a consistent power toy development cycle
- Use SCRUM to ship every 6 weeks. creating a software development lifecycle
- Alpha release
- Beta release
- 1.0 release as Shared Source
- 1.1 release as collaborative-development
- Ship high-quality pre-releases and final releases every 3-4 months per fulltime developer, including
- FXCop-clean code, unit tests for mainline functionality
- well-written, documented, extensible source code
- Define power toy success metrics, including the overall solution to the pain-point, releasing the power toys as Shared Source, and allowing for collaborative-development participation.
- Define targeted solutions to Product Feedback Center-reported issues that address customer pain-points
- Define a team tagline of “We provide solutions to the top x most suggested pain-points on the PFC”
- Extend the breadth of technologies our tools cover
- Target a solution for each development area for FY07. We’ve already targeted MSBuild, ASP.NET, TFS Administration, and debugging. Need to pick other development areas to target, like IDE, other supportability tools, SQL Server, etc.
- Define the release criteria for each power toy we ship
Enable DevDiv participation in Shared Source Releases
Power toys don’t just have to come from the Developer Solutions team alone. We’ll pave the way for other teams in the division to ship their own power toys.
- Encourage and support DevDiv product groups to develop their own Shared Source releases
- Partner with division’s release team to come up with a set of guidelines for shipping Shared Source Releases
- Assist at least one DevDiv product unit to ship their own Shared Source release
- Give internal brownbag presentations on Shared Source
- Partner with legal and upper-management to provide solid business rules for shipping Shared Source
- Provide a mechanism for the power toy communities to influence product design
- Increase the ways we source power toy ideas
- Get ideas from key customers for Visual Studio and other developer-related products
- Get ideas from internal tools
Empower and Drive Community-Developed Solutions
We don’t just want to throw code over the wall. We plan to build a community around both the tools themselves and the idea of contributing your own Power Toy to the collection. These goals define how we plan to grow a self-sustaining community around the Power Toys for Visual Studio.
- Provide excellent overall customer experience on CodePlex when using our Power Toys
- Provide build and test verification scripts to ensure high-quality submissions
- Maintain a high level of visibility and accountability to customers during tool development and after tool has shipped on CodePlex
- Publish well-written Test Plans, Specifications, and Technical Design Documents
- Investigate a Power Toy Check-in Driver for automatic build verification, unit test runs, and check-in submission
- Release all automated tests and infrastructure as Shared Source
- Provide a solid Incorporating Your Tool into the Power Toys for Visual Studio Collection Guidelines to encourage community-created power toys
- Provide a mechanism for customers to submit their power toy suggestions directly to the Developer Solutions team
- Drive improvements, requirements, and suggestions to CodePlex
- Define a power toy marketing strategy
- Define clear incentives for participation
- Power Toy Coding Competition
- Power Toy Presentations and Power Toy Booths at conferences
- Swag (Power Toy Action Figure, Hats, etc.)
- Power Toy Homepage on MSDN
- All team members have active blogs to increase team and power toy development transparency
- Partner with key members to build the power toy community (including MVPs, Academia, CTP users, Channel9'ers)
- Provide walkthroughs / whitepapers for pain-points we experience while developing the power toys, i.e. how to use a given SDK, etc.
