Book Review

All you really need to know is the following

• This is one of the best written technical books I have ever read, and is an excellent introduction to Team System
• If you have been working with Team System for some time this book is unlikely to teach you much, it is purely an introduction

The approximately 300 pages are filled with riveting content (disclaimer: I am a big fan of formal processes), and only uses screenshots where necessary. The book is far from another big font/ screenshots-on-every-page Barnes and Nobel shelf filler. As you may expect the book begins with an introduction to Team System, Test Server and its related Client Applications. Beyond these chapters, things get really interesting as Richard explains the different major roles in team system, which as we know related to different skus of Visual Studio. For each major role Richard covers the tools provided in that area, and major features. It was interesting to see that Testers do not get much in this release of Team System – this did not surprise me given Mercury’s dominance in this area. It was interesting to read in the latter parts of this book that Mercury are planning add-ins for VS2K5. Note: Developers are looked after in the testing department, but your SQA team does not get much.

Part three of the book covers MSF 4.0, MSF-Agile and MSF-CMII. Personally I think this material is better suited to a classroom, as I found it difficult to keep up with all precise terminology used by each approach. After re-reading the first pages again and again I ended up skim reading most of part three.

Interestingly the best part of the book is the only part I can criticize. Appendix A is ‘A Day in the Life of Team System’; it presents a summary of using Team System on a three month long project. This section was very helpful to me in tying the whole process together, but I just feel it was not presented in the best manner. With a pen I highlighted the key terms in the storyboard to show what part of team system was used when, but I feel the waffle outweighed talk about team system. Most people reading this book with have experience with many projects already and we just want a rapid summary.

All-in-all this is possibly the best technology book I have read since Code Complete and Writing Secure Code. Much of the material in this book will be out of date sometime next year when I expect we’ll see the second version of Team System, but I believe Richard is capable of writing a classic book that will stay on our bookshelves alongside Steve McConnell’s work.

If you only buy one programming book in your life, buy this one.

Many of you will have heard me rave about Code Complete and Rapid Development. These are both by Steve McConnell and my successful programming career owes an enormous debt to them, most of my ideas on projects seeded from these books.

Back in 1997 the first revision took me over three hard months to read. Much of the material was new to me, and it really took time to sink in – some of it never clicked. Fast forward to June 2004; The Second Edition grew about two hundred pages to incorporate new fashions on the block like xp, refactoring and design patterns. I ordered it ASAP but only just found the time to read it.

Despite ten years having passed since the first edition, many fundamentals have stayed the same, and it looks like some chapters were only lightly updated. This is proof of how good the first edition was. Personally I read the first edition about four years after completing a post-grad degree in Comp Sci. As I said there were many sections that I just did not understand fully. It is now eleven years since the degree, and the book was a total pleasure to read. So many partially illuminated light bulbs are now glowing brightly. Yes everything in the book is pretty basic stuff. The Design Patterns/ Extreme Programming/ XAML/ Avalon/ only-in-pre-Alpha release crowd will not be impressed, there are few new buzzwords to impress people with. IMO it is far more important to have good grasp of the basics before we go out looking for new hammers to use on our next project. How many of us have seen a Design Pattern used inappropriately, just because a developer happened to read about it lately?

The book is only $34 from Amazon and Steve has made some chapters available for free.