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Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

Businesses today face an increasingly complex and demanding technology environment. Applications can be developed and deployed quickly on the web, but they do not necessarily meet mission-critical criteria; mission-critical applications require significant investment and deployment across a variety of modalities such as web, desktop application, mobile, and occasionally disconnected clients. At the same time that applications must meet these complex scenarios, users are demanding higher fidelity experiences and greater ease of use.

Juggling all these elements in a contemporary development and IT organization requires new tools and processes. The Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) model has emerged as a paradigm for coordinating the design, development, and deployment of applications and managing the connections between individuals, roles, and teams. ALM helps drive successful outcomes by starting with an identified business need and then ending with specific business value delivered. Organizations have been moving quickly to adopt ALM as a solution to managing complexity.

Microsoft has created the Visual Studio Team System product family to deliver ALM to all size organizations. The delivery of Visual Studio Team System 2008 provides a complete solution ready for deployment today as well as the foundation for future extensions and enhancements. This white paper discusses the value inherent in Visual Studio Team System 2008 as well as providing a glimpse into the value that will be delivered in the future through Visual Studio Team System codename “Rosario”, the next release of the product.

Managing complexity requires solutions that bridge the gap between that complexity and the need for coordination and task simplification. Organizations can accomplish this today with Visual Studio Team System 2008.

Overview

Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008 is an integrated Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) solution comprising tools, processes, and guidance. It enables members of your team to:

Collaborate and communicate more effectively with other team members and business stakeholders
Ensure software quality using advanced quality tools at every step of the application life cycle
Gain visibility into project activity and priorities to make informed decisions based on real-time data

Value Today

Visual Studio Team System 2008 delivers high value to organizations today as well as laying the foundation for future upgrades. It is the strategic investment necessary to start getting real value from the Application Lifecycle Management model now while minimizing disruption and change for organizations already running Visual Studio Team System 2005. Future versions of Visual Studio Team System will rest on this foundation and provide an extension of tooling and processes learned now.

The tight integration of Visual Studio Team System 2008 with the broader Microsoft product suite means applications can be developed now to take advantage of capabilities in Windows Server 2008, .NET 3.5, Microsoft Office 2007, and SQL Server 2008. The new features found in Visual Studio Team System 2008 also give your developers, architects, and testers exciting new tools to explore and leverage for dynamic applications that generate immediate business value.

Customers throughout the world are upgrading to Visual Studio Team System 2008 now as a way to gain advantage in a highly competitive business environment. The demands for speed of development and deployment are continuing to increase and state-of-the-art tooling is critical to meeting those demands.

Value Tomorrow

Making the investment today in Visual Studio Team System 2008 also provides the best foundation for moving to future version. The next release of the product, Visual Studio Team System codename “Rosario”, will be the natural evolution of the existing platform and takes full advantage of the applications developed today.

“Rosario” leverages the training and tooling deployed for Visual Studio Team System 2008 and extends the vision of Application Lifecycle Management to a maturing development and IT environment. The capabilities that will be delivered in “Rosario” are the foundation for wider deployment across the organization and new functionality for architecture, project management and testing/QA. These include:

• Development Scheduling and Tracking

Teams will be able to communicate tasks and progress more effectively through work item tracking, including being able to create parent-child relationships between work items, identifying task dependencies, and tracking progress through readily available spreadsheets and reports.

• Requirements Test Coverage and Manual Testing

Being able to see the relationship between test cases and software requirements gives the test team an opportunity to identify missing test cases early, to identify which test cases are failing for a particular requirement, and to recognize trends in failing test cases. Running automated and manual test cases, testers can find and report bugs. Using the new manual test runner, they will be able to include more bug data than was previously available.

• Dependency Management

Developers will be able to identify cross-task dependencies, enabling other developers on the team to prioritize their work.

Team System 2008 now – both tooling and training – and then take advantage of ongoing pre-releases through the Community Technology Preview (CTP) program as a way to plan for future development. In this time of rapid development and deployment, organizations have a mandate to have competitive tools and development practices now; Visual Studio Team System 2008 meets that mandate.