My new company uses Microsoft Team Foundation 2008. The last time I had a look at Team Foundation and it's supporting processes from MSF was five years ago when I had to evaluate the product for my former company. It was 2005 and Microsoft created yet another agile software development process called MSF Agile. In an STSC CrossTalk article MSF Agile creator Randy Miller praised the "new innovative techniques" which the process introduced. I never undestood which new techniques he was talking about as it appeared to me that MSF Agile took advantage of practices from the agile community and gave them other names. Scenarios (aka user stories), scenario list (aka backlog), shadowing (aka incremental architecture), iteration based planning and time-boxing are all proven agile practices that even at that time existed since years.
Last week I was wondering what the new version of MSF Agile based on Team Foundation 2010 will look like. I was very surprised when I read the pre-release documentation of MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 on msdn. MSF for Agile v5 is based on SCRUM and the engineering practices from XP. It now also uses the same terminology as our industry uses since years. So no more scenarios, scenario lists etc. I think this is a wise decision from Microsoft. We don't need another termonology for the same thing. It's sometimes hard enough that there is no common style of software development in our industry.
2 comments:
MSF Agile is not really the same as Scrum with different names.
For instance, in MSF Agile, a "Scenario" is not the same as a (Scrum) "User Story". Instead, a scenario starts from a persona and explores what that persona would do/need. It is closer to a Use Case than to a User Story.
Incidentally, MSF Agile is based on the much older MSF framework from Microsoft; it's not that Scrum "invented" agile and that Microsoft just picked it up and renamed it.
I just thought I'd clear that up.
I know there is some great stuff in the MSF framework. I was just talking about the new stuff that was introduced with MSF Agile back in 2005. Isn't it funny that most of these practices are gone with v5?
I didn't want to say that SCRUM invented agile. I was talking about the whole agile community.
Post a Comment