MSF Is Evolving

The first time I’ve heard about MSF (Microsoft Solution Framework) is was a huge pile of documents and templates, covering the entire scope of the software manufacturing world, and than some more.. After spending several days reading and practicing, the feeling I’ve got was that this is actually the best source of development methodologies knowledge I came across but that the abundance of knowledge and it’s unstructured nature make it very difficult to implement.

Our second meeting was in 2005 in the MSF for agile template of team system. From the practical perspective I was very pleased to see that Microsoft has reduced the learning curve for using MSF and of course the managerial overhead required. But, I cannot ignore the fact that there is a huge gap between the old MSF  and the minimalist version in Team System. It is true that if you bother to read and follow the documentation (can be found in the portal under ‘process guidance’) you will find a very logical, and moderately methodical MSF process covering the activities of the major role players with fair explanations about the best practices for using the work items, built-in reports and document templates. The problem is that most users do not find the time or energy to follow all that and from a quick survey I conducted lately the vast majority of users only use the bare minimum and use the work items (using the very basic fields) hence leaving out most of the benefits and tools that MSF contains.

How can this be solved? with awareness and good implementation skills… in my opinion, it is important to make sure that a new customer, starting to work with TFS will understand the basic concepts of MSF and the way they are implemented throughout the Team System platform. Just having a quick explanations about using work items is hardly enough.

I have so much more to say about the issue but since it will not fit here I will just make a short list of my coming posts related to this issue:

• Gadi Meir lecture at the ALM user group about MSF
• MSF 2005 (2008) vs MSF 2010
• MSF and Scrum