I'm now in the INETA speaker's bureau - and other ramblings about VSTS
I just found that I've been added to the bureau, I'm curious to see how many VSTS talks I do in next year based on that. They sent me a form for my areas of expertise, and I put nothing but VSTS topics (Build, SCC, project management, testing, etc.) ;-)
For those that subscribe to my blog for useful VSTS info, sorry I haven't put much up lately. It's not that I haven't been doing a lot with it, it's just been a bit hectic. We're wrapping up work on level 400 training right now, which we'll have on Beta 3 once that comes out. Some of that will make it into our normal offerings, some of it is really too deep (certain extensibility topics) for the average person to care.
About a month ago we did our first Team System Quickstart for a customer in Houston, and while that was a bit rocky, it went well and they were happy. They are now working in Beta 2 and we will encourage them to move to Beta 3 ASAP once that is out - that way they can take advantage of the migration path to RTM.
The last topic I'd like to throw out is about some of the things we plan on working on once Beta 3 is out. We have uncovered several "opportunities" for improvement in VSTS, and are trying to decide which to tackle first. Obviously we'll base this on need and on how long each piece will take to do. A lot of this, we are planning on rolling up into some sort of resource kit for VSTS that we'll either use as a value-add to our VSTS services engagements, or we'll sell it for some nominal fee. Some of these we have already done work on, others are still ideas. Here's our current list:
- Some sort of work item generator/chaining tool auto create dependent work items based on what happens in your process
- Outlook integration - MS is releasing this as a starter kit, but the functionality will be very limited from what I've heard
- Administration - There are lots of things that are simply a pain in the rear (and in my opinion, they weren't really thought through) when it comes to managing large teams. The templates for manuals tests reside on the local user's hard drive, so if you modify the template, you have a deployment problem. The same thing is also true for Static Code Analysis rules and checkin policy. I think managing user permissions for SharePoint, RS, and TFS would fall under this as well.
- An alert manager. The standard alert list is small, moderately useful, and FIXED - you can't add your own. Obviously, there are events you can write code to listen for and build your own rules. For example, what if I want to know when a specific file is checked in, but I don't care about every checkin? What if I want an email when someone overrides a checkin policy?
- Reports - there are some reports we want to write, these will likely be straightfoward. Policy violation reports, bugs created by developer, etc.
- A little tool to help with SCC. Primarily, a lot of customers want check-out to also do a "get latest". Team System can't do this, we have some ideas on ways to hack this, but haven't tried yet.
- Sarbanes-Oxley targeted software process. We're already working on this and plan to have by the time TFS launches. Basically, it's MSF CMMI with extra data, extra reports, and a plugin to automatically turn on the work item policy.
Anyway, if you have any thoughts or other ideas, let me know!