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—Microsoft’s complementary Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform. Written by the Microsoft Visual Studio product owner and a long-time Team Foundation Server implementation specialist, it focuses on solving real development challenges, systematically eliminating waste, improving transparency, and delivering better software more quickly and painlessly. Coverage includes • Accelerating the “flow of value” to customers, with a transparent backlog, PowerPoint Storyboarding, VS 2012 feedback requests, and a “usability lab” right into your customers’ hands • Driving quality upstream to uncover hidden architectural patterns, ensure cleaner code, fix multiple recurring “cloned” bugs at once, ensure the definition of done with continuous integration and deployment in a reliable build process • Eliminating “no repro” bugs with VS 2012’s six powerful mechanisms for more accurate fault identification and use of virtualized test environments • Using Scrum or other Agile methods with Process Templates effectively across distributed teams in large organization by automating burndowns and dashboards to identify “early warning signals” of emerging problems with quality or maintainability • Staying in the groove by storing the state of your work and environment with shelvesets, to let you handle interruptions smoothly • Leveraging VS 2012’s new support for multiple Microsoft and open source unit testing frameworks in your IDE and continuous integration pipeline • Performing exploratory testing to uncover bugs in surprising places and testing immersive Windows 8 apps • Rapidly improving team development and collaboration with the hosted Team Foundation Service Whatever your development role, this book will help you apply modern software development practices using 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.

A comprehensive guide to using Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012 Team Foundation Server has become the leading Microsoft productivity tool for software management, and this book covers what developers need to know to use it effectively. Fully revised for the new features of TFS 2012, it provides developers and software project managers with step-by-step instructions and even assists those who are studying for the TFS 2012 certification exam. You'll find a broad overview of TFS, thorough coverage of core functions, a look at extensibility options, and more, written by Microsoft insiders and MVPs. An update of the leading Wrox book on Team Foundation Server, written by an expert team of Microsoft insiders and MVPs Provides a broad overview of Team Foundation Server for developers, software project managers, testers, business analysts, and others wanting to learn how to use TFS Offers administrators the necessary tools to efficiently monitor and manage the TFS environment Covers core TFS functions including project management, work item tracking, version control, test case management, build automation, reporting, and how to write extensions for TFS 2012 Professional Team Foundation Server 2012 builds on the proven Wrox Professional formula to give you a solid background in this software management tool.

Discover how to turn requirements into working software increments—faster and more efficiently—using Visual Studio 2012 in combination with Scrum and Agile engineering practices. Designed for software development teams, this guide delivers pragmatic, role-based guidance for exploiting the capabilities of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools in Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. Team members will learn proven practices and techniques for implementing Scrum to manage an application’s life cycle, as well as seamlessly plan, manage, and track their Scrum projects.

You're expected to produce releases at an ever-increasing rate. You're under pressure to add new features and deploy to customers sometime between your first cup of coffee in the morning and lunch, if you have time to eat it. In the meantime, you have the same release processes you've always had and it's got problems. Maybe there's some automation, but there's room for lots of improvement. Manual steps are everywhere, everyone has a different environment, and working all weekend to get a release into production is normal. One of the biggest problems is that changing how your software is released won't happen by waving a magic wand or writing a memo. It comes through effort, time, and money. That takes commitment from every group involved in the software process: test, development, IT (operations), and management. Finally, change is scary. Your current release process bears no similarity to the well-oiled machines you've seen in a dozen PowerPoint presentations, but it's yours, you know its quirks, and you are shipping. This book is here to help you with some of these challenges. It explains how to progressively evolve the process you use to release software. There are many ways to improve the release process. We largely focus on how to improve its implementation, the release pipeline, by using and customizing the default build templates provided by Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Lab Management. We move forward in small iterations so that no single change you make is too drastic or disruptive. The goal of this book is to put you on the road toward continuous delivery. By continuous delivery, we mean that through techniques such as versioning, continuous integration, automation, and environment management, you will be able to decrease the time between when you first have an idea and when that idea is realized as software that's in production. We also hope to show that there are practical business reasons that justify every improvement you want to make. A better release process makes economic sense.

Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System is written for any software team that is considering running a software project using Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), or evaluating modern software development practices for its use. It is about the value-up paradigm of software development, which forms the basis of VSTS: its guiding ideas, why they are presented in certain ways, and how they fit into the process of managing the software lifecycle. This book is the next best thing to having an onsite coach who can lead the team through a consistent set of processes. Sam Guckenheimer has been the chief customer advocate for VSTS, responsible for its end-to-end external design. He has written this book as a framework for thinking about software projects in a way that can be directly tooled by VSTS. It presents essential theory and practical examples to describe a realistic process for IT projects. Readers will learn what they need to know to get started with VSTS, including The role of the value-up paradigm (versus work-down) in the software development lifecycle, and the meanings and importance of “flow” The use of MSF for Agile Software Development and MSF for CMMI Process Improvement Work items for planning and managing backlog in VSTS Multidimensional, daily metrics to maintain project flow and enable estimation Creating requirements using personas and scenarios Project management with iterations, trustworthy transparency, and friction-free metrics Architectural design using a value-up view, service-oriented architecture, constraints, and qualities of service Development with unit tests, code coverage, profiling, and build automation Testing for customer value with scenarios, qualities of service, configurations, data, exploration, and metrics Effective bug reporting and bug assessment Troubleshooting a project: recognizing and correcting common pitfalls and antipatterns This is a book that any team using or considering VSTS should read.

Originally published: Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley, 2006 under title: Software engineering with Microsoft Visual studio team system.

Get up to speed on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with Visual Studio 2010 through a combination of hands-on instruction and deep-dives. Microsoft has packed a lot of brand new testing and modeling tools into Visual Studio 2010, tools that previously were available only to Microsoft internal development teams. Developers will appreciate the focus on practical implementation techniques and best practices. A team of Microsoft insiders provides a nuts-and-bolts approach. This Wrox guide is designed as both a step-by-step guide and a reference for modeling, designing, and coordinating software development solutions at every level using Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010. Visual Studio 2010 offers a complete lifecycle management system that covers modeling, testing, code analysis, collaboration, build and deployment tools. Coverage includes: An Introduction to Software Architecture Top-down Design with Use Case Diagrams, Activity Diagrams, and Sequence Diagrams Top-down Design with Component and Class Diagrams Analyzing Applications Using Architecture Explorer Using Layer Diagrams An Introduction to Software Development Unit Testing with the Unit Test Framework Managed Code Analysis and Code Metrics Profiling and Performance Database Development, Testing, and Deployment An Introduction to IntelliTrace An Introduction to Software Testing Web Performance and Load Testing Manual Testing Coded User Interface Testing Lab Management Introduction to Team Foundation Server Team Foundation Architecture Team Foundation Version Control Branching and Merging Team Foundation Build An Introduction to Project Management Process Templates Using Reports, Portals, and Dashboards Agile Planning Using Planning Workbooks Process Template Customizations Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010 shows developers, testers, architects and project managers alike how to leverage the power of Visual Studio 2010 to streamline software design and development.