Brian Harry's Blog

How we approach testing VSTS to enable continuous delivery

June 28, 2017 Jun 28, 2017 06/28/17

Brian Harry

I like to write, from time to time about our experiences, successes, failures and learnings from delivering Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), a large scale service, on a cloud delivery cadence.  My most recent post reflected on how cool it is to be able to deliver customer fixes within a day or two.  And I've written many times about our ...

What does an Agile/DevOps organization look like?

June 8, 2017 Jun 8, 2017 06/8/17

Brian Harry

I want to share an experience that highlights why I am so proud of the organization I work in.  The experience is expressed in the form of an email thread that I had this week.  Times/timezones are a little whacky because there were 3 - the customer's, mine and the engineer's.  But the whole thread, from my perspective, started on Monday ...

Team Services Update – June 1, 2017

June 2, 2017 Jun 2, 2017 06/2/17

Brian Harry

Sheesh, it's another huge update this sprint.  I expected a bit of a lull after all the work we put out along with the Build conference but things don't seem  to be slowing down much (or at least they've picked back up with a vengeance).  Check out the release notes for details. There's so many exciting things in this sprint and I'll ...

The largest Git repo on the planet

May 24, 2017 May 24, 2017 05/24/17

Brian Harry

It's been 3 months since I first wrote about our efforts to scale Git to extremely large projects and teams with an effort we called "Git Virtual File System".  As a reminder, GVFS, together with a set of enhancements to Git, enables Git to scale to VERY large repos by virtualizing both the .git folder and the working directory.  Rather than...

Team Services Update – May 11, 2017

May 11, 2017 May 11, 2017 05/11/17

Brian Harry

As you may know, this week is the //Build conference.  Along side that event, we are announcing a ton of VS Team Services enhancements, including rolling out our sprint 117 upgrade.  Some of the changes are available immediately (because they were previously deployed and only required a feature flag to be flipped) and others will roll out ...

Team Services Update – Mar 29 2017

March 30, 2017 Mar 30, 2017 03/30/17

Brian Harry

This week we begin rolling out our sprint 115 work.  You can read the release notes for details.  As usual, this is a forewarning of the changes, it could take up to 2 weeks before all the changes are visible in your account.  The update should go live in the first public accounts today. Overall, there's not any single thing that stands out...