Why Agile and Team System are Great but Don’t Get Along, and What We’re Doing About It

After 20 years of being frustrated with software lifecycle management tools, we’re finally doing something about it. The Exia Process is our answer. Over the next few years, we’ll find out if people like it, whether it’s useful, and most importantly, whether it helps people run software projects better.

The Exia Process is a tool that makes Agile and Visual Studio Team System work better together. We think Agile is great. We think Team System is phenomenal. We think they sort of suck together though.

Why?

Because Agile is small, light, nimble, ever changing and, well… Agile. On the other hand Team System, and especially Team Foundation Server, is big, complex, difficult to understand, powerful and frightening. Put the two in a room together and what do you get? A lot of discussion about what to do when and how, and with what, and who should do it. And not much really getting done.

See, Agile is focused on people and communication (individuals and interactions if you want to be picky about quoting the manifesto), and while Agile values tools and processes, it values the people and communication a lot more.

Unfortunately, to many Agile practitioners, that means that the more complex and far removed from the immediacy and tangibility of humans and talking a tool is, THE MORE THEY CAN’T STAND IT. And that puts Team Foundation Studio in a class of “not in our Agile shop” all by itself.

Which is a shame, because just as Agile is a great way to manage software projects, Team Foundation Studio is a great tool. Really great. The problem is just that they really don’t see eye to eye on some basic things. Take an Agile User Story for example. The idea here is you take a 4×6 card and write a couple of lines on it that describe a bit of software functionality in terms of how the user might see it, and stick it on a whiteboard. Total time, maybe 30 seconds. Take the same scenario in Team System. It has user stories too. Not only that, it has a great electronic way to capture them. Surely that must be better than cards on a whiteboard…? Well, not quite. Entering a user story in Team System is an exercise in complexity and confusion. It goes something like this:

1. Start a Team System client like Visual Studio;
   
2. Connect to Team Foundation Server;
   
3. Browse to your project;
   
4. Expand to My Workitem Queries;
   
5. Find a query that seems to make sense, like “All my user stories”;
   
6. Right click the query and click “View Results”;
   
7. Resize the window so you can see the user story you want;
   
8. Click it;
   
9. Resize again so you can see the form;
   
10. Realize that you don’t need to be here to add user stories, you could have right clicked on the project root, clicked WorkItems, Add New…
    
11. Etc.
    
12. Etc.
    

Ten minutes later you’re just a little frustrated.

If you ever do get the User Story form open, there the other little problem that it has at least a dozen fields on it. And you just came from the Agile course where they told you there were two fields on a User Story: Name and Story! What the heck!

So you get the idea.

I love Agile. I love Team System. They’re both state of the art. Together they really suck. And together with my associates at Exia Corp we’re trying to do something about it.

For a sneak preview click here..