Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Addison-Wesley
Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio
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C# Online.NET Book Review
This is not a how-to book or tutorial on Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). In fact, the reader will be hard pressed to find any specific VSTS product details in the book. Rather, this is a book on what might be called the "VSTS philosophy"—the proper place of VSTS in the Universe or—less grandly—how Microsoft envisions VSTS being used. Overall, the book provides a broad overview of VSTS capabilities, how they are meant to work together, and how they fit into the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) processes.
The book opens with an introduction to the Value-Up software development paradigm. The new "Value-Up" paradigm is constrasted with the old "work-down" one. Then, the book describes how MSF and VSTS could facilitate adoption of this approach. Of particular interest in this regard are some of the ways VSTS enables the collection of metric data about software projects.
The book continues to discuss how VSTS approaches software engineering from various vantage points: architectural design, bug reporting, development, project management, requirements, and testing. These chapters showcase various VSTS tools and relate them to the Value-Up paradigm.
The level of discussion is most suitable for program and project managers, architects, and senior developers. While the philosophy of any software usually does not pop up on my personal radar screen—it's really not my thing, this kind of information can be helpful to shops which are considering committing to VSTS.
Our author is deadly serious passionate about Value-Up; and, he reeks of credibility. He was the group product planner for the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. Before that, he was Director of Product Line Strategy at Rational Software Corporation. And, he holds five patents on software lifecycle tools.
Bottom line
Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System is a credible initiation into the basic philosophy of VSTS—the Value-Up paradigm.
From the back cover
Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System is written for any software team that is considering running a software project using Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), or evaluating modern software development practices for its use.
It is about the value-up paradigm of software development, which forms the basis of VSTS: its guiding ideas, why they are presented in certain ways, and how they fit into the process of managing the software lifecycle. This book is the next best thing to having an onsite coach who can lead the team through a consistent set of processes.
Sam Guckenheimer has been the chief customer advocate for VSTS, responsible for its end-to-end external design. He has written this book as a framework for thinking about software projects in a way that can be directly tooled by VSTS. It presents essential theory and practical examples to describe a realistic process for IT projects.
Readers will learn what they need to know to get started with VSTS, including
- The role of the value-up paradigm (versus work-down) in the software development lifecycle, and the meanings and importance of "flow"
- The use of MSF for Agile Software Development and MSF for CMMI Process Improvement
- Work items for planning and managing backlog in VSTS
- Multidimensional, daily metrics to maintain project flow and enable estimation
- Creating requirements using personas and scenarios
- Project management with iterations, trustworthy transparency, and friction-free metrics
- Architectural design using a value-up view, service-oriented architecture, constraints, and qualities of service
- Development with unit tests, code coverage, profiling, and build automation
- Testing for customer value with scenarios, qualities of service, configurations, data, exploration, and metrics
- Effective bug reporting and bug assessment
- Troubleshooting a project: recognizing and correcting common pitfalls and antipatterns
This is a book that any team using or considering VSTS should read.
About the author(s)
Sam Guckenheimer is the group product planner for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2003, Sam was director of Product Line Strategy at Rational Software Corporation. He holds five patents on software lifecycle tools. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Sam is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard University. Sam lives in the Puget Sound area with his wife and three of his four children.
Table of Contents (abbreviated)
- CHAPTER 1 A Value-Up Paradigm
- CHAPTER 2 Value-Up Processes
- CHAPTER 3 Requirements
- CHAPTER 4 Project Management
- CHAPTER 5 Architectural Design
- CHAPTER 6 Development
- CHAPTER 7 Testing
- CHAPTER 8 Reporting Bugs
- CHAPTER 9 Troubleshooting the Project
- CHAPTER 10 Conclusion
