Hi!

Hi! I am Anu, a developer in the Team Build team, that is a part of the growingly popular Visual Studio Team System. This is my opening blog entry and I intend to share my thoughts about my product, my team and about other general software development and testing practices in my coming blogs.

So, without much ado, lemme start off with a brief intro of Team Build (well, I know its cliched, but then...) Team Build in a nutshell is a build lab out of the box. We offer an end to end solution for getting build bits out of checked in sources with complete integration between source control, work item tracking system and running unit tests as part of the build process.

It has been an interesting year with Team Build, but I must admit the most exciting part of the ship cycle has been after we got the beta bits out of the door and customers started using our product. That has been a real test of the product. Scenarios that I thought no one would ever try, bugs that got just round the corner, appreciation for features that we struggled to get in, tons of queries around known issues, extensibility plans - all of these began surfacing by the dozen. This proves again that the ultimate testing of a product happens at the hands of a customer. A constant evaluation and feedback system like dropping CTP bits at regular intervals is really one of the most effective ways to strengthen a product.

Do write to me if you have any thoughts to share about Team Build or VSTS or anything in general.

So long, until my next blog (which I hope is not too far away :) )...