It's not just about the tool...!

In the past I have used the quote by James Carville "The economy, stupid" who was a strategist on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992. This quote helped the team focus on one of the core issues in the campaign. I bring this up again because it relates to one of the tenants of the Agile Manifesto. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.  The focus of this statement was to make it clear that you should prefer individuals and how they interact instead of relying on any specific process or tool. It also says to me that a tool should play a supporting role on a project, not the lead.    With that said, I wanted to introduce a book that I co-wrote with Will Stott. The book is titled, "Visual Studio Team System: Better Software Development for Agile Teams". On the surface you might be saying isn't the title of this post "It's not just about the tool..."? The book does happen to use Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) but the focus of the book is how you do Agile Development on a project from start to finish. In fact, one of the quotes we received from Scott W. Ambler (one of the reviewers of the book) is as follows: "This book provides practical advice for real-world Agile software development. It goes beyond programming to address modeling, deployment, database, and management issues (to name a few) that most Agile development books fail to address. I wish I'd written it." The book contains a large number of examples and hands-on exercises. For more details please see the companion web-sites: http://www.bettersoftwaredevelopment.org/ http://www.codeplex.com/VSTSCode If you have any questions please let me know. Will and I look forward to your feedback.

Comments

[Jim Holmes]

I've been working my way through the book and it's terrific so far.

I couldn't agree with you more about tools just being part of the solution. Dave Donaldson, a friend and very sharp fellow, wrote a great blog post on how he's done large Agile projects both with TFS and other tools (http://shrinkster.com/qhy) -- his point is very similar to yours.

Great book. I'm looking forward to finishing it.