Geekcorps Consulting in Lebanon
The plan for me for July in Lebanon was to consult directly with some of the companies that came to the workshops in May to help them implement Visual Studio Team System.
A typical week consulting normally involved:
- Monday
- Introduction to Agile development methodologies Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server
- Installation of Team Foundation Server
- Configuration of SQL Server 2005
- Configuration of Windows SharePoint Services
- Security Configuration
- Build Server Configuration
- Tuesday - with project managers and team leads
- How to implement an agile process
- Using and customizing the software development process in team system
- Setting up a project in team system, security, work items, source control check in policies
- Troubleshooting projects using team system reports
- Reporting
- Porting a current project to Team Foundation Server
- Wednesday - with team leads, architects and developers
- Architecture tools in Team System
- Dynamic Systems Initiative, application, datacenter and systems diagrams
- Class diagram tool, unit testing, code coverage and code analysis
- Thursday - with team leads, architects, developers and testers
- Source control, branching strategy
- Team Build, release strategy
- Work items
- Testing tools in Team System (load testing, performance testing, profiling)
- Friday - QA and anything we missed or the client wanted to go into in more depth
The week aimed to familiarize a development team with the major functionality of team system. We always took one of their current projects and ported it to Team System so they could see familiar business problems and source code within in the new environment. I always got very positive reactions to most of the ideas and processes behind Team System and the new tools it offers.
The three companies that hosted me were SABIS, Netiks and Netways. Many thanks to them all for their welcome and their openness to what I had to say.