Review By: Vivek Vaishampayan
04/05/2007Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System is relevant not only to QA but to everyone who is involved in the process of making software or managing software projects—developer, tester, project manager, architect, or CIO. It makes modern software engineering practices approachable and does so with clear examples of how to implement them with Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) tools.

This book offers a framework for thinking about projects in a way that can be directly tooled by VSTS. The author presents enough Team System theory and practice examples to describe a realistic process for most mainstream IT projects and teams. This book is written for the IT team as a whole and presents information in a style that will help all team members get a sense of each other’s viewpoint.

VSTS includes a process guidance function called Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF), which defines seven constituents, or points of view, that must be represented on a successful project. The seven constituents are architectural design, development, testing, release operations, user experience, product management, and program management. MSF comes in two forms, one for agile software development and the other for CMMI Process Improvement. The author has described all seven constituents in an impressive style. The content of each constituent is sufficient enough to cover the subject matter but long enough to explain the concepts.

The book itself is a kind of coach who can lead the team through a consistent set of processes. It is a well-organized presentation throughout. Sam and Juan discuss the most important items as flash points, such as planning, documentation, governance, service oriented architecture, delivering customer values, test-driven development and customer-focused testing in a superb way.

The authors’ writing styles are open and straightforward. They stress points using a lot of diagrams, pictures, flow charts, and snapshots from VSTS. Each chapter addresses specific members of the software development team, yet the entire book is targeted to whole team.

This book delivers an easy-to-understand, process-centered approach to the best practices of software development embodied in Microsoft Solutions Framework and delivered through Visual Studio Team System. Although the subject matter is presented in context of VSTS, the guidelines are universal. The material is up-to-date and timely, focusing on service-oriented architectures, test-driven development, and modern design techniques.