The single biggest item of feedback on the blog is everyone wanted to see more Agile posts from my personal day to day experience. I had written about the tools and technologies back in this post and several have inquired about Team System. We are using Visual Studio Team Software Architect Edition as our IDE. There are editions of VSTS Team Developer (8) and Team Test (2 for QA) on order. Although we are using VSTS/VS2005 as our IDE, that is as far as we are going right now. We still find that NUnit is vastly more flexible, agile and useful at this point than the unit test features in VSTS. We are using the Refactoring features in the C# edition all throughout the team except me, where I use the vastly superior Code Rush/Refactor! Pro. We are still using CruiseControl.NET as our CI environment and just returned to producing Click-Once published integrated builds (We have a Smart Client). We were using NANT as the build language but just this week switched to using the new CC.NET 1.0 MSBUILD task. We are now making MSBUILD as our standard build language throughout for future migration to TFS, as well as enjoying its power and flexibility. We are encountering more issues with VS2005 than I ever did in the long beta with IDE lock-ups and bizarre things although it tends to be more useful than VS2003.
In a bizarre Microsoft rendition of MSF-Agile and the VSTS Team Architect, that Architect product does NOT include the ability to write unit tests and the testing features that Team Test and Team Developer editions have!! I believe this is because Microsoft still does understand Agile and they still have these bizarre notions that Architects don’t code (I have seen some of this in a mailing list that I belong to as an Architect MVP). As a full Architect on my team (I’m also the “Lead” now too), I practice Just-In-Time Architecture, Agile Modeling, and Agile Architect as well as Code is Model but I code every day just as much as any other member on my team. In fact, I pair every day and write code just as much as any member on the team. My whole team contributes to architecture, not just me, because I value each and every one of them in their ability to contribute. In that regard we use White-boards as our main “Architectural” tool. Not only is this better, but the Whitehorse designers don’t do much for me yet as they do not support Indigo until the Orcas time-frame. I believe in Agile Modeling and that all such artifacts must be useful rather than just checking off some item on a checklist. In that regard, Code Is Model, and Whitehorse show promise as the SDM model allows the model to be the code and vise versa but we need Orcas-).
Not only are the testing facilities not available in Team Architect, but we are still finding that NUnit is far superior, more flexible and agile and run from our CC.NET build. At this point, we are still evaluating a TFS roll-out for Work Item Tracking and replacing Source Unsafe. We are currently tracking work items on Flex Wiki. We are not seeing any benefits otherwise as our process is heavily XP rather than the “Agile” and using all the practices of it. This may change as we roll out a test TFS server someday. We are just finishing our 11th 3-week Iteration. The last two have been dramatically better in the team members adoption of Refactoring, TDD, Collective Code Ownership and especially their estimates. Our War Room has gotten a lot bigger and we now have 10 people sitting together. We are also getting better at our use of FIT and it’s opening conversations between Business and Development. I am also using Vista as my main dev machine but that’s a whole another post-).