Agile Software Engineering with Visual Studio: From Concept to Continuous Feedback, 2nd Edition

This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

Use Visual Studio® 2010 and Agile Methods to Deliver Higher-Value Software—Without Waste, Delays, or Pain!

 

Using Visual Studio® 2010, development teams can utilize agile methods to deliver higher-value software faster, systematically eliminating waste and inefficiency throughout the entire development lifecycle. Now, top Microsoft Visual Studio architect Sam Guckenheimer and leading Visual Studio implementation consultant Neno Loje show how to how to make the most of Microsoft’s new Visual 2010 Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools in your environment.

The authors thoroughly cover Visual Studio 2010’s breakthrough team development features in the context of agile development with Scrum and related practices. They address every stage of development, from requirements through testing, and present a full chapter of exclusive “Lessons Learned” at Microsoft’s Developer Division.

You’ll learn how to use Visual Studio 2010 to empower and engage multidisciplinary, self-managing teams, and provide the transparency they need to maximize productivity. Along the way, Guckenheimer and Loje help you overcome every major cause of software waste, missed schedules, and poor quality—from build delays to irreproducible bugs, technology “silos” to inadequate distributed development processes.

 

Coverage includes

 

·        Accelerating the “flow of value” to customers in any software project, no matter how large or complex

·        Reengineering development to remove overhead: make individuals more productive and empower high-performance teams

·        Using Visual Studio 2010 to reduce or eliminate “no repro” bugs

·        Virtualizing test labs and automating deployment to make daily or intraday builds practical

·        Testing loads early to identify emerging performance “trouble spots”

·        Using Test Impact Analysis to quickly choose the right tests based on recent code changes

·        Understanding the workload each team member is carrying and transparently shifting work as needed

·        Automating “burndowns” and using dashboards to gain a real-time, multidimensional view of quality and progress

·        Uncovering hidden architectural patterns in legacy software, so you can plan changes more confidently

·        Working effectively with source, branches, and backlogs across distributed teams

·        Sharing project and other data across .NET and Java teams

 

Whatever your development role, this book will help you use Visual Studio 2010 to focus on what really matters: building software that begins delivering exceptional value sooner and keeps delighting customers far into the future.

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