Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012: Adopting Agile Software Practices: From Backlog to Continuous Feedback, CourseSmart eTextbook, 3rd Edition

Use Visual Studio® Team Foundation Server 2012 and Agile Methods to Deliver Higher Value Software Faster!

 

This is the definitive guide to applying agile development and modern software engineering practices with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 and Microsoft’s complementary Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) products and methods. Written by a top Microsoft Visual Studio development team leader and a long-time Visual Studio implementation consultant, it focuses on solving real development challenges, systematically eliminating waste, improving transparency and delivering better software more quickly and painlessly.

 

Sam Guckenheimer and Neno Loje help you make the most of Visual Studio 2012’s powerful new capabilities for team development across your entire lifecycle: requirements, architecture, construction, build, and test. This edition presents valuable new techniques for succeeding with Scrum in Visual Studio 2012 environments. Writing for every software team member, the authors identify powerful “Lessons Learned” at Microsoft, including important new lessons for reducing cycle time for deploying new features and fixes to production problems.

 

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. You’ll learn how to use Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 to empower and engage multidisciplinary, self-managing teams; improve their transparency; offer and respond to “Continuous Feedback Everywhere”; and maximize effectiveness from start to finish.

 

Coverage includes:

• Accelerating the “flow of value” to customers in any software project
• Driving quality upstream to ensure cleaner product backlogs, code, and tests, and a more reliable build process
• Rapidly improving team development with the hosted Team Foundation Service
• Automating “burndowns” and using dashboards to gain a real-time, multidimensional view of quality and progress
• Using PowerPoint Storyboarding to align users and customers with developers
• Eliminating “no repro” bugs with VS 2012’s six powerful mechanisms for more accurate faults identification
• Using new feedback features to put a “usability lab” right into your customers’ hands
• Uncovering hidden architectural patterns in legacy software so you can refactor changes more confidently
• Storing the state of your work and environment with shelvesets, making interruptions less disruptive
• Quickly implementing Scrum or other Agile methods with Project Templates
• Fixing multiple recurring “cloned” bugs all at once
• Identifying “early warning signals” of emerging problems with quality or maintainability
• Setting up Hyper-V or cloud-based virtualized test environments
• Leveraging VS 2012’s new support for multiple Microsoft and open source unit testing frameworks
• Performing exploratory testing to uncover bugs in surprising places
• Testing immersive Windows 8 apps
• Working more effectively across distributed teams in large organizations

Whatever your development role, this book will help you use Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 to focus on what really matters: building software that begins delivering exceptional value sooner and keeps delighting customers far into the future.

Forewords    xii

Preface    xvi

Acknowledgments   xxiii

About the Authors   xxiv

1 The Agile Consensus    1

The Origins of Agile    2

Agile Emerged to Handle Complexity    2

Empirical Process Models    4

A New Consensus   5

Scrum   6

An Example    12

Self-Managing Teams   14

Summary   15

Endnotes    16

2 Scrum, Agile Practices, and Visual Studio   19

Visual Studio and Process Enactment   20

Process Templates   21

Process Cycles and TFS    24

Inspect and Adapt    37

Task Boards    37

Kanban    38

Fit the Process to the Project    39

Summary    42

Endnotes    43

3 Product Ownership    45

What Is Product Ownership?    46

Scrum Product Ownership    50

Release Planning    51

Qualities of Service    69

How Many Levels of Requirements    73

Summary    75

Endnotes    75

4 Running the Sprint    77

Empirical over Defined Process Control    78

Scrum Mastery    80

Use Descriptive Rather Than Prescriptive Metrics    86

Answering Everyday Questions with Dashboards   91

Choosing and Customizing Dashboards    98

Using Microsoft Outlook to Manage the Sprint    100

Summary    101

Endnotes    101

5 Architecture    103

Architecture in the Agile Consensus    104

Exploring Existing Architectures    107

Summary    124

Endnotes    126

6 Development    129

Development in the Agile Consensus    130

The Sprint Cycle    131

Keeping the Codebase Clean    132

Staying “in the Groove”    139

Detecting Programming Errors Early    143

Catching Side Effects    154

Preventing Version Skew    162

Making Work Transparent    170

Summary    171

Endnotes    173

7 Build and Lab    175

Cycle Time   176

Defining Done    177

Continuous Integration   179

Automating the Build    181

Automating Deployment to Test Lab   186

Elimination of Waste    199

Summary    203

Endnotes   204

8 Test    207

Testing in the Agile Consensus   208

Testing Product Backlog Items    211

Actionable Test Results and Bug Reports    215

Handling Bugs    223

Which Tests Should Be Automated?    223

Automating Scenario Tests    224

Load Tests, as Part of the Sprint    228

Production-Realistic Test Environments    234

Risk-Based Testing    236

Summary    238

Endnotes    239

9 Lessons Learned at Microsoft Developer Division    241

Scale    242

Business Background    243

Improvements after 2005    247

Results    256

Acting on the Agile Consensus    256

Lessons Learned    258

The Path to Visual Studio 2012    262

Endnotes   263

10 Continuous Feedback    265

Agile Consensus in Action    266

Continuous Feedback Allows Build/Measure/Learn    267

There’s No Place Like Production    269

Summary    271

Endnotes    274

Index    275