Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012: Adopting Agile Software Practices: From Backlog to Continuous Feedback, Third Edition

Foreword to Third Edition

Sam and I met in 2003 over a storyboard. We were on this new team with a mission to take Visual Studio—the world’s leading individual development environment—and turn it into the world’s leading team development environment. He had just joined Microsoft and wanted to convince me that we would succeed not just by building the best tools, but by creating the best end-to-end integration, and he used a storyboard to show the ideas.¹ He convinced me and the rest of the team.

He also persuaded us that we should think of enabling Agile process flow from the beginning. A key idea was that we minimize time spent in transitions. We would build our tools to make all their data transparent and squeeze as much waste and overhead ...