2 comments
.NET 
A few months ago I got an Email from Jack Greenfield who asked me to work with him on writing a whitepaper on software factories and how to enable this using visual studio team system.
It took a lot of time and many conference calls with Jack and Erik Gundvaldson, but I can now announce that the whitepaper got published on MSDN!
I am very pleased with the article itself because it gave me a great opportunity to tell you more on how you can identify what parts of your software development qualify to be more automated as other things. What I see in the filed today is that many people are working on software factories and think it has only to do with automating things and building DSL’s. In the white paper I will describe what a SF is more then only DSL and how you can asses using Team System what areas (or viewpoints) qualify on investing in DSL or other types of automation. I lots of work on describing how you can measure how productive you are and what quality level you can deliver, making you more predictable in the first place when you do projects.
Jack already mentioned the whitepaper on his blog when we almost finished, but as you can tell it took a while to get it on to MSDN J
I want to thank Joop Snijder in helping me out on the part on measurement constructs. Unfortunately his name did not get mentioned in the Bibliography but he has helped me tremendously.
Anxious to read further, please go to the following link on MSDN and give me feedback on what you think or if you want more information on certain parts. I will use my blog to add more information to what I described based on your feedback. (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa925157.aspx)
Happy reading,
Marcel
2 comments
Hi Marcel,
Beautiful whitepaper! I have a couple of comments:
1. Your interpretation of IEEE’s Views and Viewpoints is good but I wonder for those unfamiliar with the concept of a Viewpoint that your description could leave them a bit skewed. Viewpoints are more than just a way to “formalize the fine-grained activities that create and modify work products.” We use them in our group and tend to leand toward their prescriptive nature as a means of describing an artifact. Sort of close to how the IASA’s Functional Viewpoint description of describing a system architecture.
2. You tend to describe system quality similarly to how SEI’s PSP/TSP methodology defines it as a measure of defects. I like this but think that there is more to the story regarding system quality and would add to that definition defects in system quality attributes such as Flexibility, Maintainability, Reusability, etc. This gives the ability to measure both the level of quality of the solution to meet the business needs once released and a measure of system quality to meet the business needs in the future. That is, if you subscribe to the notion of improving system quality improves the ability of that system to whithstand changes in the business (and IT for that matter) and helps avoid rip-and-replace situations.
Again, awesome document. Thanks!
Gabriel Morgan
Hi Marcel,
That is a very good whitepaper on MSDN. That is precisely what we want to do for our users but I’d like to know how to create Custom Wizard pages? The UI screen you published on MSDN as the wizard page, I would like to plug-in something similar using a custom process template; the question is how. I’ve looked around on MSDN but nothing really mentions that bit.
Don’t need any code examples but any pointers/hints would be appreciated.
cheers,
y
Yogesh