August Feedback on Beta 1 Content for Team Foundation 2010

Summary

• Admin content is once again the most viewed section, although not by the historical 5:1 margin.
• The trend of high ratings for new content (using new approaches) continues.

Details

In August, there were almost 15,000 page views, with 9 ratings (mostly high) and 3 comments. That's about the same as last month.

Team System

Our three high volume topics in the Team System project are still getting substantial traffic. The top level Visual Studio Team System topic received two highest (5) ratings, and the What's New topic recieved two average (3) ratings. That's very inconsistent with what we've seen in the past - high ratings for What's New and low ratings for the top level VIsual Studio Team System topic.

Team Foundation

Admin topics are again the most read section. Project management topics are still a much higher proportion of the total page reads than the traditional 1/5th. Ratings for admin & project management were good. 

Admin

 Two command line reference topics recieved the highest (5) ratings and comments. However, the comments were spam (a web site and a string of repeated x's), and the page views are low, so I won't read anything into those.

Project Management

 Project management received two highest (5) rankings and one average (3) ranking with feedback.

Planning and Tracking Projects and Query Fields, Operators, Values and Variables recieved the highest (5) rating. Planning and Tracking Projects contains much of the content that has become the Scrum Processes section of the agile process guidance in Beta 2. The topic on query fields, etc is an exhaustive reference topic rather than a scenario-based topic. The latter suggests that there are times when detailed reference info is still valued.

The walkthrough topic recieved an average (3) rating, which is low for topics that are new or rewritten for Dev 10. The feedback indicated (correctly) that the topic isn't consistent with agile practices. That sparked a conversation resulting in a new goal for work item tracking content: we will align with agile practices like iterative development, but not necessarily with the MSF for Agile process template. We're not going to do a wholesale change to realign work item tracking content before RTM, but we may have a time period after RTM where we target that alignment. In this case, the reviewer left his email, and we've been in contact with him.

Watching from Previous Months

There are a few trends that we're watching from previous months.

• Page views: Historically, admin has had about 5 times as many page views as project management. In the last few months, project management has had more than admin. This month, project management had about 20% fewer than admin.
• Empty topics: We shipped some empty topics and recieved early feedback that customers didn't like that. However, that hasn't been repeated since that first month.
• Localization: There's no new data on localization.