Planet SCM

Today, we launched a new site on MSDN - the Microsoft Tester Center!

The Microsoft Tester Center showcases the test discipline as an integral part of the application lifecycle, describes test roles and responsibilities, and promotes the test investments required to deliver high-quality software.

Source: Tester Center Home

The aim of the Microsoft Tester Center is to provide a place for software testers to share their experiences and best practices, and to shed some light on how we do software testing at Microsoft. Testers from across Microsoft have contributed content for this site, and the first couple of articles are now available in the MSDN Library:

• Best Practices: Code Reviews
• Life-Cycle Performance Testing for Eliminating Last-Minute Surprises

Visual Studio Team System embraces the entire software development team. Software testers are one of the key benefactors of this expansion in the Visual Studio product line. While Team System provides the tools software testers need to be successful, this site will help provide some of the knowledge testers need to make the best use of those tools and to cultivate the software testing community.

The team that is working on this site is eager to receive your feedback and contributions:

Contribute to This Site: Submit your articles, book reviews, videos and more. Email us to find out more.

Submit Your Feedback: Send email.

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Deitel.com just launched a Visual Studio Team System Resource Center.

You may be familiar with many of their other resource centers, or one of their many programming textbooks. If you don't already, you should subscribe to their newsletter to keep up on all of the stuff they're doing.

Welcome to the Visual Studio Team System Resource Center. "Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System (VSTS) is a collection of tightly-integrated software development tools that change the way software development teams work together. With Visual Studio Team System, organizations can reduce software development complexity, facilitate collaboration among all team members, accelerate development time, improve predictability and reliability of the development process, and customize and extend Visual Studio Team System with their own internal tools, process frameworks, and supplemental partner products." Start your search here for the latest Visual Studio Team System articles, downloads, tutorials, videos, forums, blogs and more.

Source: Visual Studio Team System Resource Center

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J.D. Meier posted a great comment to my recent post on Community Facilitates Knowledge Transfer (emphasis mine):

"Shipping the knowledge is just as important as shipping the product" ... YES! ... and a product without knowledge is support waiting to happen! - JD

Source: Rob Caron : Community Facilitates Knowledge Transfer

It's very much a case of "pay now, or pay more later" when it comes to product and technology knowledge transfer. It's a well-established fact within Microsoft that self-support within a healthy community is cheaper than calls to support engineers (somewhere north of 10x). And that's before you take into account the cost of eroded customer satisfaction when they aren't able to quickly find answers to their questions.

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Back in August 2005, I wrote a blog post in which I tried to answer the question,  What is Community? Here's an excerpt from that post:

The greatest service a product team can do for its community is to impart as much of their knowledge of the product as possible. This happens in a variety of ways: documentation, seminars, Webcasts, blogs, conferences, books, magazines, technical articles, white papers, forum & newsgroup participation, chats, and the list goes on.

Source: Rob Caron : What is Community?

What I didn't articulate, but planned to in a follow-up post, was the need for the product team to transfer as much knowledge as possible early and often. Given the cyclic nature of product development at Microsoft, communication between product team and the community at large is like communicating with an astronaut orbiting the moon.

Historically, most of the product development occurs on the "dark side of the moon" when the mass of the moon blocks communication with the Earth. During this phase, the product team is heads-down in product development of the next release. As they emerge on the "light side", starting with CTPs and moving to beta releases, communication resumes and the product teams become chatty again. Then the cycle repeats and they "go dark" again.

In recent years, we've done a better job of maintaining communication, but its almost an inescapable fact that product teams are less active participants in the community on the "dark side". This is why it's imperative to transfer as much knowledge as possible during the time on the "light side" so that the community at large sustain itself.

This brings me to the point of this post. Last week, Josh Ledgard wrote a great blog post on this subject (Facilitate Knowledge Transfer in Online Communities) that I think you should read if you've read this far. It does a lot to build on my belief that "Shipping the knowledge is just as important as shipping the product." I especially like the chart he included.

They key to successful support communities is facilitating knowledge transfer between those with product expertise and a customer set who uses the product. Today the process of knowledge transfer from Microsoft to customers is slow because we create artificial barriers by not investing in, supporting, or measuring the success of community support channels.

Source: scooblog by josh ledgard : Facilitate Knowledge Transfer in Online Communities

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For those who are interested, an interview I did with Doug Barney of Redmond Developer News is now live on their Web site, and it also appears in the January issue of the publication.

The Man Behind the Message
Microsoft's Rob Caron spends his days (and probably nights) trying to keep developers up-to-speed.

Source: Redmond Developer News | The Man Behind the Message

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