Platform Sprint 11

The new year got off to a good start for us with the MSBuild Platform Sprint 11 Backlog selection meeting. Platform Sprint 10 was focused mostly on getting our Compatibility story in place. All of the work from the last sprint in terms of compatibility has been checked in and is now in use.

This means that we can finally get to the good stuff in Platform Sprint 11. Our sprint goal for this sprint is to deliver a working version of multi-proc build capability. Needless to say, everyone on the sprint is excited about this and we are looking forward to the end of the month to see where we stand. I believe that we will have good parts of the multi-proc functionality working at the end of the sprint, and here's why:

Over the past sprints, we have been thinking a lot about the design of the system - like we discussed here and here. It is time now to start thinking in terms of real implementation milestones - and to that end we decided to think strictly in terms of "User Stories". So, everything that has to do with multi-proc that went on our backlog were real stories that would make sense to you from a customer standpoint, as opposed to items that are more closely aligned with the design or the implementation of the system. For instance, the simplest user story in our case was "Build two simple, independent projects in parallel, with no logging support, no disk-bound tasks" . You can think of the simple projects as those that have a single target, and a single Message task. That really is our first customer story for multi-proc. We build successively on individual stories till we eventually get to a fully featured multi-proc build functionality.

Of course there are a lot of other activities going on in this sprint as well. We are working on handful of bugs that we could not get to during the tail end of Whidbey. We are also investing in QA work so that we are able to deliver at an even higher level of quality during Orcas.

I couldn't have asked for a better start with the new year. I am highly optimistic of everything that is to come in the following months. In the meantime, I encourage you to log any issues you run into with MSBuild via the MSDN Product Feedback Center so that we can consider them as bug fixes during the current Platform Sprint 11, or the subsequent one.

[ Author: Faisal Mohamood ]