About this book
This book is about the science of creating software. More and more organizations are demanding that instead of being a mysterious activity practiced by a smart but unsocial group of people, software development should become a transparent business process that produces reliable outcomes. Software has become too important in the modern world to leave its creation to chance and faith.
Transparency generates trust. Communication improves productivity. Collaboration decreases execution risks. These are time-honored tenets that work when undertaking any team activity. Software development is no different. But implementing this knowledge in everyday software development activities isn’t easy, given how diverse the stakeholders are and how dispersed the teams are. It requires a platform that facilitates transparency, collaboration, and communication without any special effort by the practitioners involved. After all, people on the project teams already have too many other issues to think about.
This book teaches you how to use TFS to implement a consistent, reliable, and repeatable software development process. You’ll learn how the platform works out of the box as well as how to customize it. You’ll understand some of the limitations as well as the possibilities. You’ll realize that software development doesn’t have to be based on luck and last-minute heroics. You can construct, instrument, and institute a process that produces better outcomes. TFS gives you that power.