Chapter 58. Team Foundation Server

Software development is a hard job, from the project manager to the tester and even for the customers. Since you've made it all the way to Chapter 58, you're certainly involved in this area. So I don't need to give you statistics on how badly some development projects can go. That's why many shops have implemented quality models like CMMI, methodologies such as RUP, or Agile Practices, Scrum, or Continuous Integration. We need a tool to support all the pieces necessary to do our work better.

The basic thing, even for the smallest one-person projects, is to have a source-control repository. For bigger ones we would need more sophisticated features such as labeling, shelving, branching, and merging. We need to assign, prioritize, and track activities, and to be sure (at the end of the day or better yet after every change is checked in to our repository) that everything builds and all tests are passing. To make this process smoother and improve team communication, we need a way to report to our project managers or peer developers.

Team Foundation Server allows us to do all this. In this chapter you will see how version control works, how it integrates with work item tracking, and how after each change is made it can trigger a team build. You will also see how project managers can see reports to get a better understanding of the project status and how they can work using Excel and Project to assign work items. The team can interact using the project's portal in SharePoint and different stakeholders can get the information they need through the report server or configure it to get their reports directly by e-mail.