Engineering Practices

To increase the velocity at which your team delivers value to your customers, your team can apply engineering practices that come from agile methodologies and that support agile principles and values.

Build and deploy continuously: If a team waits a long time between checking code in and deploying a build, members of that team frequently spend a significant amount of time addressing build breaks and integration issues. If your team checks code in and builds more frequently, you can generally expect to increase your team's velocity.

Build and Deploy Continuously

Branch strategically: Your team can create and use branches in version control to optimize your application development strategy.

Branch Strategically

Test early and often: Your team can verify that it is creating the software that its customers need by effectively testing its work. Your team should start to test early and test often as the code is built. At the start of a sprint, your team should create the test plan for the sprint. That test plan can use test suites that organize the tests in a way that helps your team run them and track the results.

Test Early and Often

Model your application: Your team can use models to explore and refactor existing code, to understand your customers' needs more effectively, to help determine and communicate your software design, and to inform the development of acceptance and component tests.

Use Models in Agile Development

See Also

Concepts

Planning and Tracking Projects

Other Resources

MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0