Visual Studio Team System: Better Software Development for Agile Teams

Authors: Will Stott & James W. Newkirk
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN-10: 0321418506
ISBN-13: 978-0321418500
Retail Price: $49.99 US, $61.99 CDN
Publication Date: May 2007
Softcover: 819 pages
Online information: Table of contents, sample chapter
URL: http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321418506
Book's Website: URL: http://www.bettersoftwaredevelopment.org/

When I received “Visual Studio Team System: Better Software Development for Agile Teams”, I was very intrigued because when you see the words Agile and Team System associated, it’s usually because the agilists are bashing the product. Would the whole book be about that?

In the first chapter, you’ll first meet the OSPACS team, a fictitious development team with some serious problems. Throughout the book, the authors are using this team as a case study so you can see how Team System and Agile development can help fix the team’s problems. Next you’ll read a quick introduction to Visual Studio Team System and the Agile movement and its values.

Then the book covers various aspects like how to select the development process, version control, continuous integration, test-driven development, modeling, testing and deployment. I especially like the chapters on how to estimate, prioritize and plan agile projects because these topics are rarely covered in books.

The authors did a great job at explaining the agile concepts and how to use Team System and Team Foundation Server as tools to help you apply these concepts. Is it a book about Team System or is it a book about Agile development? If you’re looking for a Team System book, you’ll surely be disappointed because the Agile concepts get the most coverage. Is this a bad thing? Not at all except that if you’re looking at the book’s cover page, you’ll see that Visual Studio Team System is written in a large and bigger font then the word Agile so at first glance, you might think that it is a Team System book but it’s not. Again, it’s not a bad thing because the Agile coverage is very good and the use of a test case helps get things into context, adding an interesting human factor.

Who should read this book? If you’re a seasoned Agile developer, you likely won’t learn anything new about Agility and you’ll find that there is not enough Team System coverage. If you already know Team System, you’ll learn quite a lot about Agile development and you’ll likely to skip thru some of the Team System portions of the book. Team leads, developers, architects and project managers will find something of interest in this book. Finally, the fact that the authors are not zealous agilists makes it a pleasant reading.