Chapter 1. TFS and the practice of software development

Visual Studio Team System 2008 (VSTS) is Microsoft’s application lifecycle management (ALM) platform for managing the end-to-end software development process. It’s a vast product with wide-ranging capabilities. VSTS first debuted in 2005, with incremental improvements added in 2008, and contains both general purpose as well as role-based capabilities. The platform can be extended as needed. Given how geographically distributed, technically complex, and strategically important enterprise software projects have become, I feel that VSTS deserves a careful look with regard to solving real-life development challenges. The days are gone when you could hope to develop enterprise software, with acceptable quality and within a reasonable timeframe, without effective tool support.

This book is about improving your software projects by leveraging the capabilities of the Microsoft ALM platform. In this book, we learn how to resolve various practical issues by applying the system’s native capabilities, as well as by augmenting them via customizations.

1.1. Background on software development processes

1.2. TFS architecture

1.3. Major features

1.4. Summary

1.5. References