Rosario April 2008 CTP Investigation (Part 1) - Create Team Project
This is the start of a mini series during which I will review the Rosario CTP Mini-Stories, viewing it from our production perspective and highlighting exciting, missing and/or troubling features. So let's rock and roll with the latest and greatest of Team Foundation Server q:)
Again Brian Randell, one of the esteemed MVPs, is responsible for a lot of the material we are using. Thanks VSTS Product Team and thanks Brian for all the great work you are doing ... and the patience when we report issues and ask the same thing for the gazillionth time! TFS/VSTS/MVP community "rocks".
Creating a new Team Project
The first change you will notice is the new names for the out-of-the-box process templates. For this quick test we selected VSTS Process for Agile Software Development v1.0 ... the creation process was fairly or actually identical to the process we are all familiar with.
Once created, however, a closer inspection of the Documents node in the Team Explorer reveals exciting features such as project dashboards, project Wiki and documentation templates. The list is exhaustively exciting and we will leave it at that, so that we can proceed to the first mini-story, and not get distracted by excursions through this new material at this stage.
Conclusion
The creation process looks the same, however, the database and team project container structure behind the scenes is different ... more on this at a later stage ... and the visible artifacts are exciting. In the next post we will be looking at two of the artifacts, namely the Iteration Backlog and Product Backlog Excel documents, which in my opinion will revolutionise the view and use of TFS from the project management perspective.
My personal prediction ... (1) once my team reads these blogs it will not be long before we are running Rosario, (2) once I run the forthcoming "what's new in Rosario" readiness session I will be asked again and again ... "when can we have this product". In fact, I feel sorry for the VSTS product team, because this version of TFS/VSTS rocks to the power of rocks and it will be hard to keep the flood gates closed until it ships.
Next
... part 2 will look at Project Management.