New Team System Stuff - 2004-08-25

Rick LaPlante has let the cat out of the bag. The next Community Technology Preview release of Team System is imminent:

Summer time, summer time...

It’s also great to be back in the office and see the progress the team has made over the past month! I’m excited to say that today we signed off on the the last few issues and started the release process for the next Community Technology Preview.

Stay tuned for more details on how to get it and what you need to know to get the most out of it.

The Braidy Tester has an update to his Show Me post on testing that I linked to in this post:

Baby Steps

Stuart responded to my post "Show Me" saying that, basically, he's in the same boat as (based on my personal experiences) most people producing software: what I call programming by accident. Specs are few and far between. He does actually have a tester, and that tester is "very good at finding ways to make our code fail", but she doesn't know how to program so automated tests are out of the question. Stuart knows there's a better way only because he has been blog-reading; the rest of his small group has no idea anything is wrong.

On a related note, Sara Ford has a post about software testing:

What Is Software Testing?

If I’m going to start a blog category on software testing, it seems that I should begin with a simple, “What is Testing?” entry to make sure we’re all on the same page. There have been countless blog entries, books, etc, written on this topic, but here is my two cents to throw to the world.

Juan Roman Escamilla tries to replicate Team System's project management tools using SharePoint and Project Server:

Are you being wisely Agile?

I’ve finished setting up a SharePoint Portal 2003, Project Server 2003 environment to keep track of our projects and I just want to say this is the most beautiful expression of an integrated platform I’ve ever seen. I now dream with that “Choose methodology combo box” or “Sort by Iteration button” or “Current Issues list associated with lines of code in SharePoint” that you can see in the Visual Studio 2005 Team System Demo.

Ian White has an extensive post on symbol servers, which comes in handy when profiling applications in Team System:

Symbol Server

Symbol server goodness (and not so)

In this post, Ian speculates that Team System could make things easier:

Hopefully when Team system arrives, source control and Symbol server goop will be meshed and life will be perfect. Each build that is executed for a hotfix/fixpach/service pack/point or main release has it's files checked into symbol server and the source code in the source code control system associated with it.

I'll see what I can find out and report my findings in a future post.

Philip Richardson on software requirements and their role in the software development life cycle (SDLC):

Software Requirements

I'm re-reading Karl Weiger's book Software Requirements. Lately I have been a vocal critic of the requirements collection process some of colleagues took on a project I 'inherited'.

Josh Christie on web tests in Visual Studio Team System:

What's a web test?

Since not too many people have played with the first community tech preview release of Visual Studio Team System's web testing (codenamed Ocracoke), I thought I'd share some basics about web tests.