Professional Team Foundation Server

14.3. Using Team Foundation Server to Communicate Better

This is where Team Foundation Server enters the picture. It provides one tool that easily and effectively allows all the different roles on the team to work together. By facilitating effective communication between team members, it improves project productivity and success.

Let's look at some of the ways Team Foundation Server will help your team members communicate better. While we covered some of these topics in detail earlier in the book, it's worth another look here.

• Centralized information—This is by far the most important point, and one of the most important things you can take away from this book. The ability to store all the information about your project in one place is seriously powerful. Having all your source code, design documents, meeting notes, wish lists, and bugs, just to name a few, makes it easy to gauge the overall health and status of your project.

  Moreover, having a central store of all your data makes it easy to cross-reference that data, allowing you to tie your bugs to the source code that fixes them and to associate your requirements with specific areas of code. Instead of lots of different systems, Team Foundation Server gives you one place to go to find out everything about the project. This centralized store of information is also easy to back up and maintain.

• Document management—Many people overlook the fact that Team Foundation Server can do much more than just track work items or versions of ...