Microsoft's Solution for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

Building the right team and fostering a culture of continuous improvement is the foundation for success. You also need the right tools and processes in place for your team to do their best work. That’s where Microsoft Visual Studio Team System can help.

Overcoming Application Development Challenges

Whether you’re part of an application development team, or a business stakeholder who depends on IT for business-critical applications, you know first-hand some of the many challenges associated with application development. These challenges depend on the situation, but often include:

• Managing shifting business requirements throughout the project
• Communication gaps between project managers, developers and testers
• Adequately testing applications for quality and reliability
• Gaining visibility into project status to make trade-off decisions and to drive predictable project delivery
• Dealing with global development, regulatory and compliance challenges

These are not simple challenges to overcome; many are interrelated and involve multiple team members and stakeholders. By systematically improving capabilities across your team, you can achieve dramatic improvements in your project success rates, better mitigate risks and increase your overall impact to the business.

Visual Studio Team System can help your team overcome these challenges in the following ways:

Communicate and Collaborate Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server enables team-wide collaboration by providing a unified team server for all project artifacts and support for team communication, including work item tracking, reporting, version control and more.

Ensure Quality, Early and Often Visual Studio Team System enables development teams to deliver the best software by introducing quality early and often with a quality-centric toolset at all stages of the application lifecycle. From tracking requirements during planning, to load testing during quality assurance, Visual Studio Team System’s comprehensive toolset helps make quality a top priority.

Manage Team Workflow All projects have detailed work plans. Work Item Tracking is a flexible, efficient way to manage the work assignments and status across all team members.

Integrate Work Frequently Visual Studio Team System provides a full-featured version control system, which supports continuous integration and scheduled builds, labeling, check-out on edit, and the ability to relate a work item to a check-in.

Use Familiar Tools All team members can use the tools they are already familiar with, including Office Excel and Office Project for project managers, Visual Studio clients for architecture, testing, and development—including database development, and Visual Studio Team System 2008 Web Access for all team members and business stakeholders.

Make Real-time Decisions You will have all the real-time data you need at your fingertips with a comprehensive business intelligence reporting system, enabling critical decision making when it is most needed.

Drive Predictability Integrated process templates enable teams to deliver predictable results, continuously improve and adapt, and effectively collaborate and communicate with team members and stakeholders. Choose between Microsoft Solutions Framework for Agile Teams or for CMMI Process Improvement, industry partner templates, or create your own.