Using This Guide

Article
03/05/2008

This guide is intended to serve as a part of the Microsoft® Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) to guide a specialist team through test tasks and checkpoints. Testing is part of the larger desktop deployment project and must be managed as such. The objective is to have the decisions that the Test feature team makes within this initiative align with the overall project goals and have the deliverables well integrated into the total migration project.

This guide emphasizes process documentation. Detailed, step-by-step procedures are available in the appendices. If the reader’s role includes planning, he or she should read the main body of the guide. If the reader’s role includes testing, he or she should read the main body of this guide and use the appendices to guide tasks.

Note In this document, Windows applies to both the Microsoft Windows® XP and the Windows Vista™ operating systems unless otherwise noted.

Setting Up the Team

The specialist team responsible for ensuring the success of the test effort is the Test feature team. A feature team is a cross-organizational team responsible for solving a defined problem. Within the BDD 2007 for Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system (BDD 2007) project, the Test feature team is one of several feature teams that work with a project management team to accomplish specific tasks.

Feature teams are an important component of the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) Team Model. The ability to split a large and complex project into smaller sets of related tasks allows work to be performed in parallel on many tasks, with the application of specialized expertise where needed. A great advantage of this approach is an enhanced ability to manage large projects by executing many tasks simultaneously.

For the approach to work, however, it is vitally important that the teams synchronize their efforts and maintain active communication among themselves and the project management team. This is particularly important during complex projects, when a feature team may focus on its portion of the project to the exclusion of the role it plays in the overall project.

Communication

Key to successful project implementation is the team’s ability to cooperate and communicate both internally with its own members and externally with other feature or function teams within the project and project stakeholders.

Within the team, each role is considered to have equal importance, even though the roles may vary. Important team decisions are characterized by joint decision-making. For communication across teams and between individual feature teams and the project management team (defined as the lead team in this document), the process is more formal, with well-defined pathways. This formality does not prevent informal communication among the teams (in fact, informal interaction is encouraged), but it does ensure that important communications are well documented, occur at the right levels, and are directed to the appropriate team members.

An important consideration for feature teams is communicating with the project stakeholders, which typically include various entities within the customer organization. To avoid confusion, incomplete or conflicting messages, or misunderstood expectations, it is important that the product manager on the lead team act as the official project voice to the stakeholders. In this way, management is always aware of the state of the customer relationship and customer satisfaction in the deployment process is enhanced.

Additional Guidance on the MSF Team Model

For additional guidance on the MSF Team Model, see the white paper, “MSF Team Model,” at https://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/msf/default.mspx. Additional information about the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) is available at https://www.microsoft.com/mof.

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Setting Up the Team

Communication

Additional Guidance on the MSF Team Model

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