Many of you are no doubt familiar with Rally Software, who build a product for agile project planning and development. Several customers have talked with us about Rally and have been very complimentary of their tools.
I'm very excited to report that this morning Rally announced their new integration into Team Foundation Server. The integration includes integration with the VS shell to update tasks in context as well as integration with the TFS source control and build systems. Here is a link to more information: http://www.rallydev.com/press_release_080623.jsp.
I'm very curious about your thoughts and feedback; please let us know what you think.
Thanks!
Steph.
OK, thanks everyone for the feedback on the distributed development whitepaper. There was enough feedback on this that I'm going to go look into getting a version of this released out to the community.
Thanks!
Steph
Have you ever wondered if there might be a cool way to predict your bug trends? I'm not sure this is useful for all customers, but for large shops like us where we have to be so aggressive about finding, tracking and fixing bugs, having a deep understanding of bug trends can be one more great tool in terms of creating transparency and predictability in your development process. The Microsoft teams have been thinking about this too. Recently the Microsoft Office team sent us a really nifty Excel-based tool which they use to predict their bug trends. The tool analyzes their bug trends from previous releases and, based on current incoming, projects what their bug trends will be for the current release. I thought this was pretty cool!
Andrew Delin on the VSTS team was looking at whether we could productize this into our shipping reports for our next release. This one isn't scheduled to ship in the box. After a ton of customer discussions about our stack rank, it looks like this particular one is below the current cut line – we've heard a lot of feedback that this is better to give to customers directly. So, Andrew has posted this out to the community in raw form. Even if we don't ship it, we wanted to share the ideas with the community and also let people pick up the prototype in case they want to customize and use it.
So, if you're curious on ideas for how to set something like this up, you can find more information on Andrew's blog post here: link. Hope that is useful.
Thanks!
Steph
One of the questions Soma was asked last year while he was travelling in Europe was, "how can VSTS be used for distributed development?" VSTS is widely used for distributed development – in fact, our own team is distributed across 3 major sites (Redmond, Raleigh and Hyderabad).
Soma asked us if we could write a whitepaper describing this to help the field out, which was a very good idea. Last year Sudhir Hasbe and Brian Keller wrote a great whitepaper on how to use VSTS for distributed development. It includes a complete overview for using VSTS in branch office scenarios, virtual office scenarios and for contracted and/or fully outsourced development. If you are reading this and you work in the Microsoft field, you can find the whitepaper posted here: [link] .
We don't yet have a version of this available for wide distribution outside the field. If you are reading this and you are a customer, please comment on the bottom of this blog post and I'll happily read the comments. We actively prioritize our work according to what is most useful to customers and always appreciate feedback.
Thanks!
Steph
Last week at VSLive! I was asked this good question:
I was wondering how the dependencies for refactoring were taken care of in the Database Pro application? I am asking only in relation to how your application works and if we should look out for anything funky when using it here at work and my request has nothing whatever to do with my side project. -Eddie Merkel
I thought others might have this question, so I wanted to post the reply from Gert Drapers: We parse all SQL ourselves, and interpret it next to build up the dependency graphs. This way we have column level dependencies, where SQL Server only knows about object level dependencies. SQL Server is adding functionality in SQL Server 2008 to fix up the dependency information after it has been broken, but you will only be getting object level dependencies, which is fine and good enough for scripting out objects,, but not for refactoring like we do. I hope this answers your question. -GertD
Gert's blog is a great place to get info on DB Tools: http://blogs.msdn.com/gertd. Gert is the Group Manager for this team and has a tremendously deep knowledge of both SQL and his product.
Thanks!
Steph
Another question I am frequently asked is: "how can I customize the software development process(es) that come with TFS?" In fact, was just asked this morning. I would say that last year, it was really difficult to find all this information. We didn't like that at all. So, we have created a new site where you can easily find all this information and more. Here is a link to the site where you can find all information on different processes on TFS, including all our partners' information, how to customize your process... everything: Process Site on MSDN. If you have a new template you want us to feature, you can have us do that as well! Just email ajoyk@microsoft.com. Also, I'd love to hear any suggestions for the site as well as your "top 10 list" for any new templates we could ship in the box.
We think of our goals like this:
- Get customers up and running quickly. We ship with 2 processes out of the box. The idea is that one is for more agile projects, one is for more formal projects. (We call the formal one "CMMI". I've never been sure about that because it took me a long time to figure out that was the formal one! I always wonder if customers have the same problem. =) ) Interesting stat, 50% of our customers use the agile one or use it as the base for modifications... that's pretty high! We are definitely thinking about extending this list of templates in the future. I just need to know what you need most.
- Help customers customize their process to fit their needs. We know that no process fits all needs - every software development team has special processes that you've adapted to work efficiently. We ship a Process Editor to tailor your process.
- Help them find additional process as they grow more advanced / have special needs. We have a wide variety of partners who ship additional processes on top of TFS. There is a Scrum template, an FDD one, a RUP one... quite a few great ones. The community has also posted some really nice templates for use
You can find information on all three areas up on the process site. I hope that helps!
Steph
Another question I often get asked is, "What features does VSTS have for Agile development?" This is a great question because VSTS is widely used for Agile development today. Many of our customers like to use VSTS out of the box, and then if they have specific needs they might grab a great partner template like Conchango or Cognizant.
For Agile Conference 2007 last year I wrote a short deck overviewing the VSTS features for agile development - I just updated this for a Deloitte briefing last week. Here is a link to the deck. This really just touches the surface - let me know if this is useful, I can post more information on this subject if there is alot of interest.
Thanks!
Steph
I am happy to announce that we finally have good guidance for our customers who have questions around SOX compliance and VSTS! We are often asked by our customers and by the field about how to think about SOX and software development processes. Andrew Delin on the TFS team, with the help of SOX experts in the team, has written a very thoughtful whitepaper on this topic. You can find it posted on MSDN at this link: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc441754.aspx
Steph
So today I am writing to you from San Francisco. This morning I gave a talk here at VSLive which was "A Lap Around VSTS 2008". The new product is very cool, and I would upgrade for the perf and scalability improvements in TFS Server if nothing else - we drive perf and scale numbers up in every single release. That said, there is a raft of new features here and a ton of reasons to upgrade.
For this talk I did mostly demos which is more fun. You can actually check out everything I demo'd just by downloading the VPC of the 08 release. I love this - such a quick and easy way to test drive VSTS without having to go through all the setup. You can pick them up from this link here.
I wanted to get the slides up right away so here they are: link to slides. I will come back later this week and see if I can write a short post summarizing the new features so you don't have to read all the slides if you'd like.
This is my first blog and I'm pretty new to it. Please bear with me as I figure it out. I always appreciate feedback. J
I thought people might be interested in some more information about Visual Studio Team System, especially around our future development plans, and some detail on some particular topics like agile and distributed development. I talk about these things a lot in briefings and conference talks. I got asked Wednesday if I have a blog where this information can just be looked up, thus eliminating the step of actually needing to talk with me. I'm not sure what that means, but I liked the blog idea. J
By now Visual Studio Team System has been in the market long enough that I'm going to assume you know a little bit about it, or you wouldn't have found this blog. If you want to learn more about Team System, MSDN has a nice overview of the suite: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts2008/products/bb933734.aspx. I am a Group Manager in Visual Studio Team System. I was one of the founding members of the Database Edition and a member of the planning team for the VSTS 2008 and Rosario releases, today I run the development team that delivers Agile solutions on top of VSTS, the VSTS Process Team.
I myself love Team System. I genuinely think the people here work very hard to build a tool that you will love and we can use ourselves. There is really no mystery to how we are doing software development here – we listen very very hard to our customers, and then try to prioritize and build what you need as rapidly and efficiently as we can. I'd love to share more information with you and always like to hear comments.
Thanks!
Steph
