What is included with this book?
Sam Guckenheimer
When I wrote the predecessor of this book, I had been at Microsoft less than three years. I described my history like this:I joined
Microsoft in 2003 to work on Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), the new product line that was just released at the end of 2005. As the group product planner, I have played chief customer advocate, a role that I have loved. I have been in the IT industry for twenty-some years, spending most of my career as a tester, project manager, analyst, and developer.
As a tester, I’ve always understood the theoretical value of advanced developer practices, such as unit testing, code coverage, static analysis, and memory and performance profiling. At the same time, I never understood how anyone had the patience to learn the obscure tools that you needed to follow the right practices.
As a project manager, I was always troubled that the only decent data we could get was about bugs. Driving a project from bug data alone is like driving a car with your eyes closed and only turning the wheel when you hit something. You really want to see the right indicators that you are on course, not just feel the bumps when you stray off it. Here, too, I always understood the value of metrics, such as code coverage and project velocity, but I never understood how anyone could realistically collect all that stuff.
As an analyst, I fell in love with modeling. I think visually, and I found graphical models compelling ways to document and communicate. But the models always got out of date as soon as it came time to implement anything. And the models just didn’t handle the key concerns of developers, testers, and operations.
In all these cases, I was frustrated by how hard it was to connect the dots for the whole team. I loved the idea in Scrum (one of the Agile processes) of a “single product backlog”—one place where you could see all the work—but the tools people could actually use would fragment the work every which way. What do these requirements have to do with those tasks, and the model elements here, and the tests over there? And where’s the source code in that mix?
From a historical perspective, I think IT turned the corner when it stopped trying to automate manual processes and instead asked the question, “With automation, how can we reengineer our core business processes?” That’s when IT started to deliver real business value.
They say the cobbler’s children go shoeless. That’s true for IT, too. While we’ve been busy automating other business processes, we’ve largely neglected our own. Nearly all tools targeted for IT professionals and teams seem to still be automating the old manual processes. Those processes required high overhead before automation, and with automation, they still have high overhead. How many times have you gone to a 1-hour project meeting where the first 90 minutes were an argument about whose numbers were right?
Now, with Visual Studio, we are seriously asking, “With automation, how can we reengineer our core IT processes? How can we remove the overhead from following good process? How can we make all these different roles individually more productive while integrating them as a high performance team?”
Obviously, that’s all still true.
Neno Loje
I started my career as a software developer—first as a hobby, later as profession. At the beginning of high school, I fell in love with writing software because it enabled me to create something useful by transforming an idea into something of actual value for someone else. Later, I learned that this was generating customer value.
However, the impact and value were limited by the fact that I was just a single developer working in a small company, so I decided to focus on helping and teaching other developers. I started by delivering pure technical training, but the topics soon expanded to include process and people, because I realized that just introducing a new tool or a technology by itself does not necessarily make teams more successful.
During the past six years as an independent ALM consultant and TFS specialist, I have helped many companies set up a team environment and software development process with VS. It has been fascinating to watch how removing unnecessary, manual activities makes developers and entire projects more productive. Every team is different and has its own problems. I’ve been surprised to see how many ways exist (both in process and tools) to achieve the same goal: deliver customer value faster though great software.
When teams look back at how they worked before, without VS, they often ask themselves how they could have survived without the tools they use now. However, what had changed from the past were not only the tools, but also the way they work as a team.
Application Lifecycle Management and practices from the Agile Consensus help your team to focus on the important things. VS and TFS are a pragmatic approach to implement ALM (even for small, nondistributed teams). If you’re still not convinced, I urge you to try it out and judge for yourself.
Foreword xvii
Preface xix
Acknowledgements xxvi
About the Authors xxvii
Chapter 1: The Agile Consensus 1
The Origins of Agile 1
Agile Emerged to Handle Complexity 2
Empirical Process Models 4
A New Consensus 4
Scrum 6
An Example 12
Summary 15
End Notes 16
Chapter 2: Scrum, Agile Practices, and Visual Studio 19
Visual Studio and Process Enactment 20
Process Templates 21
Process Cycles and TFS 23
Inspect and Adapt 36
Task Boards 36
Kanban 38
Fit the Process to the Project 39
Summary 42
End Notes 43
Chapter 3: Product Ownership 45
What Is Product Ownership? 46
Scrum Product Ownership 50
Release Planning 51
Qualities of Service 63
How Many Levels of Requirements 67
Summary 70
End Notes 70
Chapter 4: Running the Sprint 73
Empirical over Defined Process Control 75
Scrum Mastery 76
Use Descriptive Rather Than Prescriptive Metrics 81
Answering Everyday Questions with Dashboards 86
Choosing and Customizing Dashboards 94
Using Microsoft Outlook to Manage the Sprint 95
Summary 96
End Notes 96
Chapter 5: Architecture 99
Architecture in the Agile Consensus 100
Exploring Existing Architectures 103
Summary 121
End Notes 123
Chapter 6: Development 125
Development in the Agile Consensus 126
The Sprint Cycle 127
Keeping the Code Base Clean 128
Detecting Programming Errors Early 135
Catching Side Effects 152
Preventing Version Skew 160
Making Work Transparent 168
Summary 169
End Notes 171
Chapter 7: Build and Lab 173
Cycle Time 174
Defining Done 175
Continuous Integration 177
Automating the Build 179
Elimination of Waste 196
Summary 201
End Notes 202
Chapter 8: Test 203
Testing in the Agile Consensus 204
Testing Product Backlog Items 207
Actionable Test Results and Bug Reports 212
Handling Bugs 218
Which Tests Should Be Automated? 219
Automating Scenario Tests 220
Load Tests, as Part of the Sprint 225
Production-Realistic Test Environments 230
Risk-Based Testing 232
Summary 235
End Notes 236
Chapter 9: Lessons Learned at Microsoft Developer Division 239
Scale 240
Business Background 241
Improvements After 2005 245
Results 254
Law of Unintended Consequences 255
What’s Next? 259
End Notes 259
Chapter 10: Continuous Feedback 261
Agile Consensus in Action 262
The Next Version 263
Product Ownership and Stakeholder Engagement 264
Staying in the Groove 270
Testing to Create Value 275
TFS in the Cloud 275
Conclusion 276
End Notes 279
Index 281
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