Series of Articles on using VSTS

elandes — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:07:00 GMT

On MSDN, there are a series of articles to help explain how to use VSTS and TFS within a large organization. Called Global Bank: A Scenario for Visual Studio Team System 2008. This article has an excellent introduction to the possibilities of how VSTS and TFS can assist with your software development life cycle.

There is a lot I love about VSTS and TFS to help in managing development. And there is some room for improvement. The article shows how a company utilize all aspects of VSTS. For instance there's a good introductory scenario using the architecture tool. I'm not sold on this tool for various reasons, but if you haven't tried it out, there's a good example of how to use the tool. What sets this apart is the interconnections between the different tools.

Another problem I have with the presentation of this is that it follows a more waterfall method. So I'm thinking an agile scenario might be a good story to create. Hey that might be a great idea that I might write! But if you don't have a mature software organization, this series could help you visualize how to grow that organization.

TDD and Visual Studio Testing

elandes — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:32:00 GMT

This blog post by Uncle Bob at Objectmentor got me thinking about how Visual Studio automated Testing can help in your Test Driven Development effort.

First off, let me say that I fervently agree with Uncle Bob that TDD cannot be replaced by automatically generating tests. The intent of Test Driven Development is for your tests to drive your development (duh!). So if I have to create my objects first, and then generate my tests, our tests could not possibly be dring our development.

That seems self-evident to me, but I urge you to look at Uncle Bob's post if you need more convincing on why TDD is a good thing. As stated in Bob's post, if you do have legacy code, though, automatically generated unit tests can help with creating a beginning suit of tests for that code.

But what makes the automated generation a benefit (and I am mainly familair with Microsoft Visual Studio products, not others) are the following thought. If you are a one or two man shop who can't afford training, but have Visual Studio Testing, these autogenerated tests can demonstrate some good techniques for creating unit tests. I'm not saying these are tests written by Kent Beck, but they can help a beginner with where to start.

Be sure to supplement this with a book like xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code (The Addison-Wesley Signature Series) by Gerard meszaros. The point is that this aspect of Visual Studio can help get started.

Corporate Coder : Visual Studio 2005

Series of Articles on using VSTS

TDD and Visual Studio Testing