New Prescriptive Guidance for Visual Studio Team System

Our patterns and practices team has just released new prescriptive guidance for Visual Studio Team System!

Since my previous post we've made significant updates with the addition of the following content:

This puts us on course to deliver on these main outcomes we have in mind for our Visual Studio Team System Guidance Project

  • The single best repository of Visual Studio Team System guidance
  • Practical and insightful scenario-based guidance for roles (PMs, developers, architects, testers ... etc.)
  • Thoroughly engineered and tested set of recommendations
  • Great entry point through videos, roadmaps, and task-based How Tos
  • Breadth and depth coverage

Project Overview
While Visual Studio Team System provides powerful new tools, customers are asking "where's the guidance?" ... "where do I start?" ... "how do I make the most of the tools?"  In response, our team is building a definitive Body of Guidance (BOG) for Team System. This includes How Tos, Guidelines, Practices, Q&A, video-based guidance, and more.

We’re helping customers walk before they run, so we’re starting with the foundation.  On the code side (for developers) – this includes source control, building your dev and test environments and setting up a build process.  On the project side (for PMs) – this includes work items and reporting.  Once we have the foundation in place, we can move up the stack to making the most out of Team System for the various roles (tester, architect, developer … etc.)
 
We're framing out the tough problems using Scenario Frames (for an example see Source Control Scenario Frame).  We then identify where we need guidance and perform solution engineering.  This involves building out reproducible customer scenarios, vetting potential solutions, and sharing the ones we can generalize enough to be broadly useful, yet still specific enough to be actionable.
 
We're partnering with customers, product teams, support, field, MVPs, and subject matter experts.  We’re working closely with Jeff Beehler to synchronize efforts with the VSTS Rangers, such as the Branching Guidance.

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