I attended the Agile with Team System and DB Pro event hosted by MTUG Cork on Monday night. The evening was broken into two sessions, Brendan Lawlor firstly presented “Can Microsoft Development be Agile?” which was an excellent presentation. Brendan began by describing what he meant by Agile by drawing an unexpected but excellent analogy to Zara (an agile company in the clothing industry). He then proceeded to show how his company (Decare) has implemented the agile methodology using Microsoft Team System taking advantage of continuous integration, unit testing and refactoring capabilities built in. I really enjoyed the talk especially since I am an ethusiastic CruiseControl.Net /Nant / NUnit user for the past two years.

The second session was entitled “Introducing your Database Objects to the Agile Process Using Microsoft Visual Team System” presented by Alan Crowley. Alan explained how with the emergence of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals that the database has really been integrated into the software development process. Database scripts and schemas are now treated as a standard artifact and can be subject to the same processes as regular code, including source control, refactoring and unit testing. It really showed that Microsoft have put some thought into how to bring in the work of the DBA or SQL Developer into the software development process.

Overall time well spent with two very interesting sessions. Looking forward to more MTUG Cork sessions in the near future. Thanks to Joe Gill as ever for organising everything.