Joel From Canada : Team System

Why I Love the Team System Team

Joel Semeniuk — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:52:54 GMT

I really enjoy being a Microsoft Regional Director and an MVP for Team System, however, I don’t think I would enjoy it as much if the VSTS team wasn’t as good as they are. They ABSOLUTELY get it! They have been nothing but open and engaging with “us” (the community at large) and work to continually add value to consumers of their product base on the feedback they hear (yes, they actually listen).

A great example of this is the Team System Power Tools – which the VSTS team release “out of stream” – working to provide customers value early and often without having for us to wait for service packs and major releases. The latest example of this is detailed on Brian Harry’s blog…

http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/10/01/preview-of-the-next-tfs-power-tools-release.aspx

If you are a software vendor this practice is absolutely something you should consider adopting. First – listen to your customers and those who aren’t your customers (because they aren’t your customer for a very good reason). Next, don’t rely on Big Harry Audacious Releases to solve problems. Trickle out the value, get feedback early and often, work this value back into the core product and the world will be a happy place.

Of course, none of this works if you are a software consulting company where value is more determined by the contract you are bound to… but I’m not bitter.

Requirements Management with Team System White Paper

Joel Semeniuk — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:11:00 GMT

Requirements Management is something very near to my heart. So, is Team System. Wouldn't you know that there is now a white paper out from Microsoft that talks about both!!!

Metrics for Developers?

Joel Semeniuk — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 21:48:00 GMT

Check out this article by Nigel Cheshire - quoting both Sam Guckenheimer and Joel Spolsky about whether or not measuring developer performance is a good thing or not. Both Sam and Joel say to stay clear away from doing this. Where do you stand? Personally, I say that we need to "professionalize" our industry a bit more before we can be effective at doing this. Tools like Team System make instrumentation of developers a lot easier, however I don't think we can clearly understand the inter-relationship of metrics on individual developers well enough yet. Nigel compares Sales people to Developers in this respect - asking why we can ask Sales people to hit metrics and not ask Developers to do the same.

I think we'll be there one day - however, I think the real way to measure developers is how they interact as a team - and from that measure the team by the results of that team - in this case the software they develop. Our industry needs to has a lot more maturing to do before we should focus on individual developer metrics, as there are likely hundreds of other aspects organizations can improve upon first that have greater value.

http://au.sys-con.com/read/325131.htm