Five reasons to Integrate Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System Theory and Practice Software Development Life Cycle Management Series The paradigm complexities of the constantly changing requirements in the software life-cycle require a superior level of communication across highly specialized roles that are often distributed geographically. To succeed in distributed development, technology companies have to leverage next-generation development tools, which provide end-to-end project planning, tracking, development, building, testing, and reporting.
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Five Reasons To Integrate Microsoft Visual Studio Team System
This guide will provide you with a comprehensive overview on why VSTS is vital across all phases of product life-cycle management. It will also help you to better understand how you can rationalize development costs, gain higher product quality and accelerate development cycles with VSTS.
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Five reasons to Integrate Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System Theory and Practice
Software Development Life Cycle Management Series
The paradigm complexities of the constantly changing requirements in the software life-cycle require a superior level of communication across highly specialized roles that are often distributed geographically. To succeed in distributed development, technology companies have to leverage next-generation development tools, which provide end-to-end project planning, tracking, development, building, testing, and reporting.
Stem. Theory and Practice.
Five reasons to Integrate Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System
This white paper brings a number of best practices on leveraging Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2005 across all phases of the product life-cycle to enable software companies to rationalize development costs, gain higher product quality, and accelerate development cycles.
We understand the actual state of this problem. Only big companies can invest a big amount of money into
automatization of development process. And as a result - new systems don‘t cover all company‘s needs.
The process should be flexible to correspond with changeable world. We understand this and found the most
effective tool, that allows us to adopt automation system to our needs.
We have waited for at least a beta version of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) from Microsoft since early
2005. We expected that this would be the system that would likely satisfy our requirements; when we
succeeded in trying it, we were not disappointed. The system was 90% as good as we expected. Moreover, it
had some additional functions, such as the ability to have as many life-cycles as needed; supreme ability for
extension and integration with other (not only Microsoft) products; top-level customer service. The ideology of
the system is also very beneficial. The management tool integrated with the developers‘ environment makes
the resistance of users to a new system minimal. It really saves time when switching between applications,
and it makes reporting—a task unloved by—almost unnoticeable.
One major factor stands out. The significance of this factor is higher than any other. Using VSTS leverages the
level of our outsourcing business greatly. Since Visual Studio is considered to be an industry standard for all
Microsoft developers, we are able to provide a supreme level of integration with our customers. Members of
distributed teams located in different offices, countries, and even continents can work as if they were in one
room and even more efficiently. VSTS provides tremendous abilities for project monitoring and management.
This document will help you understand what VSTS is, how you can use it in-house, and how helpful it is in
software development outsourcing.
What Software Developers Concerned About
When it comes to product life-cycle management, there are several primary objectives:
Shorten time-to-market timeframes Software companies should rapidly narrow the gap between what the customer needs and what the
software delivers by increasing functionality, adaptability, usability, and manageability.
Deliver increased product feature sets There should be a strategic release management plan that optimizes usage of the product engineering
and QA team.
Improve product quality Software companies may use the testing and validation services of an independent team with specialized
skills that stays focused on delivering a zero-defect product.
Constantly increase software development efficiencies To succeed in the next economic cycle in the software business, companies have to increase efficiency
and productivity, as well as create and consolidate software assets into reusable components and blocks.
Increase market share and customer/partner retention by focusing on the strategic activities and the core business Software companies can leverage a thoughtful and balanced offshore strategy across the entire product
life-cycle to keep key people focused on strategic activities such as product management, marketing,
sales, and customer service.
Application development organizations engaged in distributed development environments should press
vendors for toolsets that mitigate the risks of global, collaborative application delivery.
The Gartner Group
Can Visual Studio Team System help?
Historically, Microsoft has left team development tools such as source control and engineering life cycle
management to third parties but has provided a good framework under Visual Studio to integrate all these
facets. However, the recent acquisition of Rational Software by IBM has triggered interest within Microsoft to
build up its stack in all the areas of engineering life-cycle management and team development.
The main theme under which Microsoft has evolved its development platform continues to be productivity.
Microsoft defines this as Personalized Productivity, where it has gone beyond developers and created tools to
support other roles in the software development process like architects (covering both Application and IT
architects), designers, testers, and project managers. The objective is to separate these roles efficiently and
provide appropriate personalized tools to streamline their work and integrate it into the mainstream.
By wiring VSTS into Visual Studio, Microsoft transformed its toolset into an instant and consistent enterprise
development system of surprisingly little complexity.
The transparent, constantly circulating life-cycle model of application development, deployment, and
maintenance challenges comprehension, much less implementation. But Team System, as implemented by the
assembled components of Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite, bypasses that problem for small and medium-sized
development teams: it handles the paradigm complexities while your people focus on their jobs.
Whether through globalization or outsourcing, global resourcing will no longer be an optional strategy [for