No documentation for customers in MSF Agile?
Can someone point me to a set of activities in MSF Agile that deal with creating and delivering appropriate guidance for using a finished system to the people who will use it?
While trying to figure this out I noticed that the "Business Analyst" role was shown with the rounded box labeled "User Experience" in the introductory page on Roles. Since the type of the rounded boxes wasn't identified I'm not exactly sure what they are intended to be, but I can guess they are either the names of historical MSF roles being mapped to MSF agile roles, or collections of responsibilities needed to deliver a completed project (the old definition of a role in MSF). Unfortunately, I couldn't find any activities associated with the "Business Analyst" role around delivering guidance.
Is this kind of guidance something that is typically left to the customer to create for themselves?
Hi Dave, You point out an area that is currently in the works. MSF has traditionally been coupled with MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework) which describes how to deliver a system to operations. This combination, of course, is only valid for internal deliveries. On the external front, we will be delivering a set of whitepapers on this and many other subjects to our MSDN workbench when Visual Studio Team System ships early next year.
Randy
MSF
Thanks for the reply Randy,
MOF doesn't really cover developing end user documentation or other user experience for software development projects, whether they are internal or external.
MSF originally defined a set of responsibilities that every software project must fulfill to be successful. Assuring that end users would be able to understand and use the software was one of those responsibilities. In previous versions of MSF this responsibility was covered by the User Education role on the development team and this worked for internal or external deliveries.
Delivering content on this responsibility as a whitepaper makes it seem like something that's peripheral to the development process rather than an integral part of delivering a successful product or project. While I've been involved in delivering products that didn't require any separate end-user documentation, to accomplish this required a fair amount of usability design and other user experience activities during the product's development. If the people responsible for these activities had not been a specific and integral part of the team, it wouldn't have worked, even though they wrote no code at all.
I'm sure you're working on great content in this area, but I'm not clear why it shouldn't be integrated with the other core concepts in MSF Agile, not relegated to a whitepaper that many people will never find?
