Visual Studio Team System - a project manager’s dream?
Have you started playing around with VSTS yet?!?!? Maybe you should. If you are at all interested in process improvement and decreasing time to market, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System is worth exploring.
Look, I don’t have any particular leanings towards (or against) Microsoft, but with VSTS, they really do seem to get at many of the pain points of what a typical shop struggles with as they work through the SDLC.
Okay, so I’m a process guy. I admit it. But any tool that makes the process easier is going to grab my attention.
But, how does it make the process easier you ask?
Well, imagine this…
You get that new contract signed to start working on adding functionality to your website. What’s the first thing you do? Well, the first thing I do is worry about the infrastructure. So, I open excel and start making a list of tasks let’s see…
- Assign project setup to Infrastructure Architect
- Assign project setup to Solutions Architect
- Begin making a project plan with key milestones to help measure progress
And then, I hit a wall…I have to wait for the architect team to give me the go ahead from here. So, because I am a worrier, I check with them constantly until they are done. Then, I can start work on my project plan.
I’m already getting tired and this is just the beginning of the project and I’m destroying my relationship with the architecture team. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just send out my project setup items to the architecture teams as tasks and monitor there progress in a project based system? Enter VSTS.
VSTS allows you to enter tasks in MS excel import them into your project plan which also has development tasks which are updated as developers check in code and testing tasks that are updated when testers run their tests. See, this is the value of VSTS, it allows me to manage the project without running from one group to the next.
I can see unit test coverage, code progress, test coverage, test results, build results all in one place. I can even see performance test results. Shoot, I can even run the unit tests, the functional tests and not only can I now understand the performance test results, but I can re-run the performance tests at my leisure.
December 8th, 2006 at 11:22 am
[…] The third Stelligent Early Quality Podcast, which focuses on Visual Studio Team System, was recently published. Paul Duvall and Trevor Paradis discuss what VSTS is and how it can facilitate easier management through increased traceably throughout the software life-cycle. […]
January 21st, 2007 at 5:34 pm
[…] FxCop is an easy to use static analysis tool, which scans .NET assemblies for violations to pre-defined rules (like naming conventions, security, etc)– while it is now bundled with VSTS, there are still plenty of NAnt-loving shops out there. If your .NET project uses NAnt as a build system and you’re looking for a quick mechanism to objectively look at your code base, then follow these four easy steps for FxCop-NAnt nirvana. […]