Review By: Vivek Vaishampayan
04/04/2012

This is an excellent workbook that bridges the gap between traditional project managers and agile project practitioners using Microsoft Visual Studio (MVS). The authors provide thorough insight in using features of MVS 2010 towards agile development with Scrum and modern software engineering practices.

The authors describe the fundamental agile concepts in a precise manner to help readers understand the essence of agile development without going into details. They also cover all aspects of MVS and show how to make the best use of MVS application lifecycle management tools in an agile environment. They provide great insight from concepts to continuous feedback.

The book is very useful for testers working in agile environments, since they will use the features of MVS in automating metrics and use dashboards to gain a real-time, multidimensional view of quality and progress. This is supplemented by using test-impact analysis to quickly choose the right tests based on recent code changes.

The book is equally useful to the developers who will be part of empowered agile teams. It provides an excellent view of sprint cycles used in agile, keeping code base clean, utilizing check-in policies, detecting programming errors early, refactoring, generating unit tests that can be reused for build verification, and automated code analysis. The book helps in understanding how to utilize the MVS tool to configure, branch, merge, and baseline the code.

Overall, the book delivers tons of information and readers can start using the techniques from day one. It is suited for people of all levels in agile software development. The authors worked in making the MVS tool, and it's great to gain insight from the builders of the tool.