Develop Code for a Backlog Item and Fix a Bug
This topic continues a tutorial that follows members of a fictitious team as it adopts Visual Studio as its solution for application lifecycle management (ALM). Peter and Julia use Visual Studio to overcome the typical challenges that developers face in their daily work.
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Peter’s task is to develop some new methods. He begins by writing some examples of how the methods will be called, and discusses these with Julia, one of the developers who is writing the code that will use Peter’s new methods. Peter incorporates these examples into unit tests. He then goes to work on the code, first making these unit tests pass, and then writing more detailed tests to make sure that the code works in all cases.
.png "Unit Test Explorer showing failed test for equal")
Peter’s team uses unit testing extensively because they have found that this helps to keep their bug count low. The additional effort to create the unit tests pays off well by reducing bugs and by improving the quality of the code.
Like many developers, Peter faces the challenge of often being interrupted, for example, to fix urgent bugs. Peter uses My Work to suspend his work. Later, when he has fixed the bug and is ready to continue his earlier work, he chooses Resume to make Visual Studio restore his code, the state and positions of his windows, his breakpoints, and several other key bits of state that help him more quickly and easily get back on track.
.png "Panes affected by suspending a work item.")
Peter and his team also use several collaborative strategies to improve code quality, including code reviews. This practice is especially important when developers must very quickly write and check in code, potentially coming in cold to an area they may have not worked in recently.
To see details about these and other ways the team uses Visual Studio to develop the code, see Day in the Life of an ALM Developer: Write New Code for a User Story.
Related Topics in this Tutorial
Next (Storyboard a Backlog Item) | Tutorial Home
See Also
Other Resources
Visual Studio ALM Rangers Solutions and Projects
Technical Articles for Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management