I was super excited when I got to work this morning. Jason Anderson had sent me an email in which he talked about a totally impromptu meeting with a number of customers at a Seattle “Geek Dinner.“ It turns out that there was a lot of debate about the unit testing tools in Visual Studio Team System and whether or not they should be shipped only in the Team System SKU's (and as part of MSDN) or whether they should be included in the Visual Studio Professional product. It seems that after the debate Jason and Tom Arnold brought the attendees from the dinner over to Microsoft's campus (and a reporter from a local newspaper) and gave a demo of the product, along with the integration features they were talking about.
Jason, Tom, and I work on the same team; and whether or not they changed anyone's minds I am very proud of the fact that they were willing to listen to the concerns they were hearing and go the next step of showing people the vision they had for the product we work on. It's a privellage to work with Program Managers who care so much about their customers that they'll stay until 11:30PM to help bridge the gap between Microsoft and the community. They rock!
P.S. For another viewpoint on the meeting, check out http://blogs.msdn.com/rholloway/archive/2004/06/22/162134.aspx
My wife gave birth to our first child, a daugther, on 6/15. I'm thrilled and I'm even finding that she's worth the email back log I built up! :-)
We've only a few more months of coding left on Visual Studio Team System and we're in the process of doing that last brutal scrub through the feature list to see what will make it and what needs to be saved for the next release. I always find this a very emotional time of the product; it's hard to say good-by to your dreams, but there's also something cathartic about bringing out the sword and hacking through the Gordian knot of features we can't finish in time. Anyway, part of this process has given me some insights I hadn't had before; I suspect a lot of people will disagree with them, but for me they're real.
Some of the schedules I've seen floating around teams (Not on Team System) have had one or two lines on them that said, “taxes.” These are catch-all buckets for things like actually making the product setup, creating test data, doing work to function on the target OS (instead of the one used during development), or even writing unit tests. Lately these things have infuriated me, but perhaps not for the reason you might think.
It's a fact of life that software development today is full of little frictions that slow down the project. Of course many of the “taxes” people list on paper are really “investments” in the long term, but there are some real time wasters out there. But pay those taxes doesn’t really bother me. The Team System team wants to get rid of those. Instead it's the lack of focus on shipping.
Things like setup and integration aren't taxes, they are fundamentals. Some people think that you can do these things later, after you add more features. But I don't understand how to ship a product if I can't install it.
The insight driven by my frustration is something that I think every small business owner knows, “cash-flow” crunches can kill you. A cash flow crunch happens when you have a lot of assets (say dump trucks) that you need to deliver a service and sometimes you have a lot of customers who have already paid, so on paper you're running a profit. But in reality there is no money in the bank because everything is tied up in either capital or financing. Basically you don't have any cash to go on.
The same thing can happen in software. If you can't ship your product and use it as a springboard for the future you'll burn through the good will, cash, and drive that is needed to have a future. You'll tie all of this energy up in features and not create any way to recharge. The reason I get frustrated when I see “taxes” on the schedule is that these are often the only things that give you a hope of shipping and bringing energy back to fund the future. Using a term like “taxes“ implies a lack of attention to these things. But the truth is that they aren't “taxes“ they are the antitode to bleeding it all out on interest and deficit spending.
Jason Anderson is one of the PM's on the Visual Studio Team Developer and Team Test team (yes it's a long name, we use eDT for short...) One of the questions we get asked a lot is whether the unit testing functionality will be in Visual Studio Professional and Standard in addition to the Team System. Jason has a post outlining our thinking on this issue.
Tom Yager had a very balanced article on VSTS; and I've got to say, that on our team we hope we can get more right than Tom expects! :-)
“From language improvements to life-cycle management, the new VS Team suite and the VS development environment itself seem almost certain to make Microsoft programmers and their bosses happier. But will these new products sustain Microsoft’s momentum, particularly as it tries to move upscale into more challenging enterprise development environments? As usual, the company seems unlikely to get the new stuff completely right the first time. But salves for the disgruntled and nods to enterprise work modes should make VS 2005 and VS Team the most attractive development products Microsoft has released in a long time.“
I posted an overview of the
Visual Studio Team Test extensibility points. This isn't a “How-to” article, Brian Crawford is working on that, and it is coming. But I hope this article will help any one who is interested in authoring their own test types to get a sense for what they might do.
One of my concerns in blogging has been a fear that my obvious enthusiasm for Visual Studio Team System would come across as marketting instead of passion. Right now there is a huge amount of energy on the Visual Studio team for our lifecycle tools and I worry how that might come across. I know how I feel when I watch an infomercial, and I don't like it. I guess people can see a lot of motivations for energy.
So, I wanted to thank Sal for a great post Sal's Soap Box that reminded me of what I'm trying to communicate and made me feel that at least someone is getting across this message:
- The Microsoft people here really want to make better products to help us do our jobs better and easier. So many of the Microsoft Employees that I have talked to have such a passion about what they do I think they should all be commended. The level of knowledge and passion is inspiring. I really feel different about Microsoft as a whole since meeting so many of the people who work behind the sceens
Thanks Sal!