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by Sam Gentile.
Original Post: Visual Studio Team System Release Candidate VPC on MSDN
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I just noticed that the VSTS Release Candidate VPC image is up on MSDN Subscriber as they promised. This is a great thing as it will save myself and many others a boatload of time. You may have noticed the other day in my listing of tools we used in our Agile team, we were running with Visual Unsafe. Obviously this is not a good situation and we're looking to change that ASAP. There are other SCM tools we are looking at, but it would be obvious with a a pretty strict Agile group that we would at least look at TFS and MSF-Agile to replace Unsafe and give us additional “Agile” capabilities. The issue is whether it would detract or add from our current velocity on our project. This is of great concern and worry to us. We have a good velocity right now with our current tool-set. VSTS/TFS would have to help us do things better without substantially impacting our velocity. So far, we are seeing that NUnit + TestDriven.NET are much more flexible, adaptable, less friction, and faster than the Testing capabilities in VSTS for instance. We may be able to derive benefit from the Work Item tracking for instance but right now you can't get much faster than turning around to the Information Radiator, i.e. the big board with all the User Stories on index cards in this iteration and circling the done index card with a green marker. In Team Explorer, you would have to manually create them and then track them, doing things in the UI. Its a level of effort and the question becomes then are you “Agile” or now driven by the tool; the “tool's methodology” or MSF-Agile? Yes, I know that all of the process templates and everything else is totally customizable but the question in Agile always comes down to - does this help me ship working software in the iteration quicker and if it doesn't its overhead period. The Agile value is that we ship working business functionality every Iteration (every three weeks). The tool will either help that or get in the way. And thats a concern.
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