Expected Criticisms

Expected Criticisms At the time I am writing this book, Team System has just shipped. I've made a number of claims, and I expect a fair amount of criticism for them, so let me plead guilty to five major indictments right now: This book is not Agile enough. In particular, I expect to be dinged for not following the Agile Manifesto tenets closely enough.[2] For example, I write more about processes and tools than individuals and interactions, and more about change in the context of a plan than responding to change without a plan. Actually, I think that a huge strength of the Agile community has been the effervescent tooling that has emerged for unit testing and change management. And processes such as XP have demonstrated the great value of discipline. With VSTS, we are trying to make tools and practices like these easier and more approachable to a much wider community than they have been before. This book is not prescriptive enough. A value-up tenet is the importance of situationally specific strategies. I've tried to focus on recognizing and understanding the situation, trusting that if the whole team can see the same data, the team can work on the prescriptions. There is certainly a book waiting to be written on situationally specific management patterns. There is not enough depth for each of the disciplines. I've written this as the introductory book to a series. A book targeted specifically to development practices with VSTS will be available shortly after this one is released. I hope many authors will join me over the next few years. And I realize that I stopped short on the vital topics of user experience, release management, and operations. I don't have enough data to support my claims. Not yet. Microsoft is certainly going to accumulate case studies around VSTS, and you will be able to find them on http://msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem. I hope that they reveal enough insight into the processes used and enough data to illustrate the values that I discuss here. The sources are too random. Software engineering is not new and does not occur independently of its business context. I've tried hard to bring in the threads of both the valuable work of the community and the business environment of the twenty-first century. I often find software debates to be very black-and-white, but I see the situation as much more multi-colored. I hope that you too may come to prefer the color and gradation over the absolute black or white projection. I also might be accused of making too much of a product sales pitch. I have tried to argue the design ideas that led to the creation of VSTS with as many examples as I could fit. I've tried wherever possible to distinguish the ideas from the implementation, but I have used the product to illustrate them. I hope you found the presentation balanced.