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After spending all week in training, I've had a few minutes to look into MSF Agile beta again. Without regard to the actual content, as I'm still going through it, it definately seems a lot more detailed and complete, as would be expected. My biggest complaint is that it seems to have lost the overall flow. That is, I can look at any individual Workstream/Activity/Step and determine who does it, what the dependencies are, what it consists of, and what the exist criteria. Unfortunately I can't easily map the dependencies for each workflow to the other workflows. I suppose that some argument can be made that "VSTS will lead you through the process", but I'd still like to understand to goings-on in MSF Agile.
Otherwise, the layout is good, the delivery looks fine but the navigation isn't always intuitive. I always seem to find another link that provides more depth into other areas of the documentation. Although the process seems to be pretty detailed, providing step-by-step in most (perhaps all) cases, I work best with examples and templates. There are screen shot examples of Work Products, but no actual documents samples or templates within the HTML section of the guidance. I finally noticed that there are acompanying subdirectories that do contain some templates:
- Project Management:
- Development Project Plan.mpp (haven't opened)
- Project Checklist.xls (two copies - both empty)
- QoS Requirements.xls (empty)
- Scenarios.xls (empty)
- Test Development Plan.mpp (not checked)
- Requirements:
- Persona.dot (nice/simple 2-page template)
- Scenario.dot (simple template for describing a scenario)
- Vision.doc (Template as a document for Vision)
- Vision.dot (Template for Vision - slightly different text than the above)
- Security:
- Security Asset List.xls (List header)
- Threat.dot (simple template for describing a threat)
- Test:
- Test Approach.doc (Empty sample containing coverage and techniques matricies, etc.)
- TestApproach.dot (More polished template version of the above)
Hope this little review helps others who are interested in the MSF Agile beta but haven't had time to dig yet.
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A new release of MSF Agile (or MSF for Agile Software Development as presented by Randy Miller) has been released. It seems to have many more details than the previous version. I haven't had time yet to thoroughly review it. Stay turned for additional information on the contents! Until then, you can download it yourself here.
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There are a couple of things worth repeating from the news from the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week (I'm sure many security experts would say there is a lot more than this...).
The first was directly pertinent for me as I was helping a friend just last night trying to help cleanse his system of SpyWare. Although the Microsoft Windows AntiSpyWare has been around for awhile (in fact the beta is posted as a top download on Microsoft's home page), there has been speculation about what would become of it. One big thing of note is that this will become a free service. The underlying SpyNet technology and process of detecting and guarding against SpyWare/MalWare/AdWare is pretty interesting. Here are some links from ZDNet, the first with a video subset of the Bill Gates keynote and the second is an article entitled Windows anti-spyware to come free of charge. The official Microsoft Press Release is also worth browsing.
The second piece of interest was the decoupling of Microsoft's future IE7 from the operating system. The IEBlog provides a few more details on the when and who for IE 7.