There have been some great announcements at the Tech-ed North America 2011.
The announcements have been around,
- Enhanced User Experience
- Agile Planning Tools
- Lightweight Requirements
- Stakeholder Feedback
- Code Review Features
- Continuous Integration
- Agile Quality Assurance
- Aligning Quality Assurance
Some buzz words you will be hearing overtime with vNext will be code review, search code blocks, my Work Hub, context switching, intellitrace in production, scom integration with TFS….
Agile Planning
No more working with excel sheets to manage your sprints and backlogs. This is one of the pain areas with VS 2010, though the VS team released sprint planning excel sheets, but that did not excite the Business Analysts and scrum masters managing the sprint backlog very happy. The other problem being that an organization using TFS might not have the same process template for all the projects hosted in the TFS, this meant, the planning excels that work for one project, would not necessarily work for the other.
- Telerik and EMC2 introduced bespoke tools such as work item manager and sprint work bench to manage the work items and sprints but it really lacked the user experience.
- The TFS Web lacked drag drop functionality, urban turtle released a paid plug in that let you do that and more but really that was a missing feature from TFS web.
But no far, a sneak peak at some of the screen shots of what the upcoming agile planning tools will offer. And the best part is that this is not process template dependant!
Lightweight Requirements
For those of you who have used Expression Blend SketchFlow know useful it is demonstrating a working mock up of the changes that you are about to make with the new requirement. Lightweight requirement will give you a PowerPoint plug in to do just that, this will add a ‘Story boarding’ tab to your ribbon.
Stakeholder Feedback
Visual Studio vNext introduces a new feedback tool (based on the Test Professional support VS2010) which allows a product owner to use the new features and provide actionable feedback. This will support voice, video, application action recording.
Code Review features
vNext will give you a ‘my HUB’ as they call it. A quick access to work item search, work items assigned to you. Code check in, shelve, code review, etc.
Cameron Skinner & Brian Keller presented a talk on this,
Exciting, eh?