Understanding Visual Studio 2005 Team System

With the ever increasing complexity of the IT solutions that are given there is a need to build and maintain such solutions properly. New technologies and business give the challenge of building and maintaining the IT solutions. To be successful in the industry you need state of the art new products that match the complexity of the existing scenario.

Some of the challenges that are faced in giving ideal IT solutions are Communication between the teams and team members, the use of proper tools for creating the solutions, the availability of the proper tools in an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), software process integration, and the ROI that is spent on learning new technologies and tools. These are all easily overcome by the use of the Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

Some of the features that are available in the Visual Studio 2005 Team system enable easy communication between the Team members. Simplified reporting is possible using the Visual Studio 2005 Team system. Data that is gathered with this system is in a data warehouse where it can be accessed by the other tools and applications enabling reporting easy. The requirements of the customers can be easily translated into work items by the Project Managers and this can be passed to the team members for further development. Thus the Project Managers can also track the status of the work item that they have delivered to the team members.

Testing and performance tools are integrated in this Visual Studio 2005 Team system so that the developers can access and use these tools in the IDE itself. This helps them to improve the quality of the work. Unit testing, code analysis and performance profiling can be done from this environment. With such tools in place the defects in the code are identified at an early stage and quality products are developed.

Identifying the defects at the early stage saves a lot of money for the organization. Workflow is an important part in any software development. This workflow is easily achieved by using Visual Studio 2005 Team system since the SDLC process is built-in in this IDE. This enables the project metrics to be collected easily without any manual reporting. Learning unnecessary concepts and tools is not necessary if you use Visual Studio 2005 Team system since all the necessary tools are integrated in this system and it also helps to improve the software development lifecycle. Once communication and the productivity are increased you see an automatic increase in the ROI.

At the user interface level itself the necessary tools for SDLC are integrated. The users can access the tools for code analysis, code profiling, unit testing, and work item tracking from the current environment itself. A data warehouse that common to the system is provided and it enables the gathering of data and to know the status of the project easily. Thus managing the software process is very easy with Visual Studio 2005 Team system.

The data collected can be presented as customized reports that are needed for the customers and the internal teams. This removes the need for the manual reporting. Since process is integrated with Visual Studio 2005 Team system the transfer of work between the teams and the team members becomes easy. Adopting the SDLC process becomes easy for the team members that they need not do any extra work that is associated with the process. This leaves them free from worrying about the work associated with the process which is usually an overload for the team members.

The extensibility model is adopted for building the Visual Studio 2005 Team system. This enables the vendors to integrate different tools with the Visual Studio 2005 Team system that might be useful for the developers to complete the project. Complementary products and services can be integrated into the Visual Studio 2005 Team system. Visual Studio Team Foundation Core Services is used to integrate these tools with the IDE.

With this the data that is collected with these plugged in tools (third party) can also be added to the common data warehouse where these data can also be used for customized reporting. Templates for the methodologies adopted for each project in an organization is available with the Visual Studio 2005 Team system. This methodology might vary with the project and even with the organization. This allows process extensibility where you can have customized work flow, check-in policies and templates for the management of the projects.

Any software development team would have architects, developers, testers, project managers. The tools in Visual Studio 2005 Team system are designed to help all these members of the software development team. Moreover the collaboration among the different teams is also enabled smoothly with the Visual Studio 2005 Team system.

An Architect Edition of this product is available for the architects to create service oriented solutions. This is called the Visual Studio 2005 Team Architect Edition. Visual Studio 2005 Team Developer Edition is available for the developers which has the tools for code testing, analysis, and unit testing. Visual Studio 2005 Team Test Edition is available for the testers which enable them to perform a variety of tests that are needed to ensure the quality of the product that is developed. Tools for unit tests, manual tests, load tests, and web tests are available in this product. Tools for performance analysis are also available in this product.

The product Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation has tools that are needed for the Project Managers. These tools are based on Windows Sharepoint Services, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Excel. This can also be integrated with Microsoft Office. A dashboard is also available in this system which can be used to find the status of the projects. The data collected through the workflow is available to track the project in this product. Apart from these there is also a need for communication between the teams of the projects. This is also provided in the Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation edition. A Portfolio Explorer is available in this product for this purpose. This product provides excellent work item tracking and source code control.

For more details on these tools and features you can refer to the MSDN website in the internet. You can use Visual Studio 2005 Team system to reduce the complexity in delivering a good IT solution and to improve the collaboration among the team members. The product can be customized according to the organizations and also according to the projects available within an organization.