Last night was the first time I’ve ever attended one of the Atlanta SPIN meetings.  This group seems to be targeted at project managers and seems to cover topics like Scrum and CMMI.  These are great topics, but outside of my personal area of interest so I probably won’t be going back unless they get another headline speaker like Mr Randy “Granville” Miller.  I will say this about the group – they had the most formal meeting and leadership structure I’ve ever seen in a community user group!  We had about 35 people in attendance, which one of the SPIN leaders said was extremely good turnout for their groups.

Randy Miller has an impressive pedigree in the Agile development community – he’s worked for years at Borland and Microsoft to bring eXtreme Programming and Agile techniques to the masses.  He’s written several books, including an upcoming book soon to be released.  Randy came to the SPIN meeting to talk about his work with Microsoft and the Microsoft Solutions Framework (he actually got “yelled” at for starting his talk too early!).

For those unfamiliar with MSF, you can learn a lot on the Team Systems MSF homepage.  Essentially, MSF is a set of software tools which help you stick to a software development process.  For example, you have a business analyst talk to a customer and write up a list of requirements.  The list of requirements is broken down into small tasks by project managers.  The developers estimate how long each task will take and hand the task list back to the PMs.  The PMs schedule the development cycles and turn the tasks back over to the development team.  The devs work like mad getting quality stuff (including automated test (we hope) out to the test team and finally everything is built for the customer.  In this development process, there are some tools helping you get through the process.  The business analyst might use Excel spreadsheets.  PMs might use MS Project.  Devs and Tests might use Visual Studio.  Visual Studio Team Systems can actually link all of these tools together with the built in issue tracking and reporting system so the experience of managing the software development process is seamless.  MSF for Agile is one type of software development process.  There are countless other methods which can be used with VSTS – Scrum, CMMI, Iterative, Rational, Waterfall, etc.  That’s actually the coolest part of MSF – it can be completely customized to your particular method of development.  MSF for Agile, out of the box, is simply a set of recommendations and process guidance for Agile development.

Randy spent 99% of his time showing us the tools, only resorting to PowerPoint to display a graphic and web links.  We watched as he started a brand new project and talked us through adding requirements, planning out iterative cycles, breaking larger tasks into smaller tasks, reporting on the status of those tasks, etc.  The “business analyst” persona created a spreadsheet of requirements, which was checked into a SharePoint work area.  The spreadsheet was imported to Project, which automatically populated the VSTS work items.  We did some fake scheduling and prioritizing and we were ready to develop.  We looked at several reports showing our status and what things would look like as they went wrong.

Randy was a great presenter and I’m sorry that he only had an hour to talk to us.  I felt that he had more to say if only he had the time.  Oh well.  If you were unable to make it to the presentation, I hope that my blog entry piques your interest and you start to learn more about the extraordinarily flexible toolset that Visual Studio Team Systems offers.

-- Matt Ranlett