4 ms·
I would argue that you were right when you wrote: > Even as Microsoft stuck to its waterfalls internally, Visual Studio was used by third-party developers who
by ethomson 12y ago
I would argue that you were right when you wrote:
> Even as Microsoft stuck to its waterfalls internally, Visual Studio was used by third-party developers who themselves wanted to use agile methods, creating pressure on the Developer Division to build better support for these approaches.
These features are definitely being driven by external customers. (Disclaimer: I work on the TFS team, in particular on the Version Control team, so I can speak to the changes in version control throughout the years.)
TFS was initially conceived as a mix of the tools for software development (version control, issue tracking, continuous integration) that were heavily influenced by the tools already in use at Microsoft to build (say) Windows and Office. That's why the version control component in the first version of TFS was a checkout/edit/checkin model. Clunky, yes, but scalable to the sizes of the codebases that we wanted to support internally. That's also why the work item tracking is crazily flexible in ways that are barely comprehensible to mortals, it was meant to adapt to the different development practices that go on around these parts. So TFS 2005 looked a lot like the development tools that existed within Microsoft at the time, and it was really aimed at "influential" internal customers.
And that's great, but most of our customers outside of these walls don't have crazy multi-gigabyte source trees and the same checkout/edit/checkin model that's so useful for a code base the size of Visual Studio is an unnecessary annoyance if you've got a much smaller or more modular code base. And if you have a dodgy network connection or you travel alot, it's downright problematic. So bringing an edit/merge/commit model ("local workspaces") and a DVCS (Git) to the party were truly about growing and adapting TFS for our customers, who tend to be a little lighter weight and more agile than we are.