VS SDK Community Documents

Hi, this is my 2nd blog entry. I will try to find the time to update more regularly.

This time, I want to talk about the community documents the SDK Team has available for download. These come in 2 flavors:

    1)planning docs for longer-term planning

    2)sprint backlog/review book-end documents for each CTP release

In terms of documents of type 1, we have posted both the plan for all 4 VS 2005 focused SDK releases ( v1-v4 ) as well as the v2 plan. We didnt post the v1 plan because it had already shipped. You can expect we will post a similar v3 plan. These long-term planning documents allow the community to see where the SDK team is taking the SDK and allows the community to comment on our direction. They also allow the community to see the contents of a particular release and comment on the appropriateness and priority of the contents of a release. The SDK Team highly encourages the community to eyeball these documents and provide feedback.

In terms of documents of type 2, we have posted the sprint plan and sprint review for each release (CTP, RTM ). The community can view these documents as a book-end for the release that shows what we intended to do as well as what we actually accomplished. From these book-end documents for each release, the community can see how the team lives up to the commitments we make at the start of every sprint.

In terms of how often the documents are downloaded, the following report makes clear that while there is an order of magnitude difference between the interest in the SDK download itself and the community documents; the interest in the community documents is growing over time.

Community Downloads Report

Planning Docs

VS SDK Product Plan ( plan for all 4 Whidbey focused SDKs )

2005-December 188

2006-January 211

2006-February 125

524 Total Downloads

Feb 2006 planning.xls ( plan for the entire v2 release )

2005-December 90

2006-January 122

2006-February 72

284 Total Downloads

Sprint Docs

Feb Sprint

current sprint, docs not uploaded yet

Jan Sprint

Backlog

Downloads By Month

0 Total Downloads

Review

Downloads By Month

0 Total Downloads

Dec Sprint

holiday, did not provide a download or documents

Nov Sprint

Backlog

2005-October 85

2005-November 152

2005-December 26

2006-January 8

2006-February 3

274 Total Downloads

Review

Downloads By Month

2005-December 77

2006-January 42

2006-February 14

133 Total Downloads

Oct RTM

Backlog

release activities, did not provide backlog

Review

Downloads By Month

2005-November 47

2005-December 19

2006-January 7

2006-February 3

76 Total Downloads

Sept Sprint

Backlog

 

Downloads By Month

2005-October 24

2005-November 3

2005-December 1

                        28 Total Downloads

 

Review

Downloads By Month

2005-October 17

2005-November 5

2005-December 2

24 Total Downloads

Aug Sprint

 

Backlog

Downloads By Month

2005-October 5

2005-November 3

2005-December 1

9 Total Downloads

 

Review

Downloads By Month

2005-October 6

2005-November 3

2005-December 1

10 Total Downloads

The trend validates our efforts to get these documents in front of the community, as over time more and more people are downloading them. I am interested in feedback on what other sorts of team documents would be of interest.

 

In future blogs, I will talk to the long-term product plan as well as the contents of v2 and future releases. Stay tuned.

 

Phil