PDC Session: Agile Software Development with Visual Studio

By: David Starr Category:General PostTag: New Post:

Speakers: Lori Lamkin and Sunder Raman

I must say, the degree to which the VSTS stack is being optimized for Agile software development is intriguing. VSTS drank the Agile Koolaid. Pretty striking.

"The debate on tools is over. Good tooling is necessary to a successful Agile implementation." Well, I guess I agree with most of that.
TDD in 2010 demo.
- Using ASP.NET MVC
- Wrote the test that referenced a non-existent class (because it isn’t written yet). Then right click the classes and methods to gen them in the SUT project. Nice. This will save a lot of time. He just created a failing test that compiled by stubbing the classes being tested.
- Basically, this is showing off some new, shiny refactoring tools. Looking at the new refactoring options, they are getting more complete but ReSharper is not quaking in its boots.
Continuous Integration
- Gated Check In. Brian Harry showed a little of this sweetness in the last session, but this is the session showing the real juice.
- "The longer you wait to integrate, the longer it takes to do it." Amen.
- Gated check in
  - Creates a shelfset (invisible to the person checking in)
  - Does a merge to main with the shelfset
  - Builds on a build agent without
  - If all passes in the build, the shelfset is merged into main.
  - Now main will go build
They are talking about basic support for Scrum in the new Agile process template that comes out of the box.
Process Template and Work Items

The task work item includes actuals on hours.
Reports (like burndowns) are being moved into Excel worksheets. This will make passing around metrics about the teams and iterations so much easier.
Velocity is being calculated in hours. They still don’t get it.
The word Iteration is still used over the word Sprint. I am fine with that one.
Excel is being heavily favored over Reporting Services. Good.
Work Item management is primarily moving into the WSS and MOSS portals. Thank goodness! This means fewer sights and maybe we wont need a separate web access application.