Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio® 2010

INTRODUCTION

IN JUNE 1999, MICROSOFT STARTED TO RE-EVALUATE HOW Visual Studio was being used as part of the software development process. Microsoft was continuing to serve the needs of an individual programmer through the highly productive "code-focused rapid-application-development" features of Visual Studio, but wasn't doing much to help programmers work together as a team. And what about software architects — how should they be working with the programming team? And testers? Project managers?

Many teams had begun to set up their own solutions using a mixture of third-party, in-house, and vendor-provided tools to address such challenges as version control, bug tracking, and team communications. But this mishmash of tools can be tricky to set up and maintain, and even more difficult to integrate. Microsoft sought to address this challenge by providing an integrated set of tools designed to address the needs of the entire software development team. Thus, Visual Studio Team System was born, and was first released with the Visual Studio 2005 product line.

Team System was built from a foundation of tools and technologies that Microsoft had been using internally for many years to build some of the most complex software projects ever undertaken. Team System appealed not only to programmers, but to all members of the development team — architects, application developers, database developers, testers, and project managers. Team System was built to address the entire software development ...