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 end-users and the development team
• 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. However, 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.

Investing in the Right People, Tools and Processes

Building the right team and fostering a culture of continuous improvement is the foundation for success. But you also need the right tools and processes in place for your people to do their best work. That’s where Microsoft ® Visual Studio® Team System can help. It’s an integrated Application Life-Cycle Management (ALM) solution comprising tools, processes, and guidance to help everyone on the team improve their skills and work more effectively together.

Visual Studio Team System enables members of your team to:

• Gain visibility into project activity and priorities to make informed decisions based on real-time data.
• 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.

Visual Studio Team System is part of Microsoft’s Dynamic IT vision for a new generation of integrated IT products and technologies to help customers gain greater strategic advantage through their IT investments. It advances our progress with the Dynamic Systems Initiative and Microsoft’s application platform strategy and includes integration across our Project Portfolio Management (PPM), Application Life-cycle Management and Systems Management products.

Visual Studio Team System offers an extensible platform based on Web services to enable third-party integration and customization. Over 200 Visual Studio Industry Partners offer more than 400 supplemental products to support a broad range of software processes, tools (including Java environments such as Eclipse), and platforms (such as Unix and Mac OS).

Return on Investment

Improving and maturing your application development capabilities can provide incredible Return on Investment (ROI), but requires commitment. The rewards are quantifiable:

• EDS realized a 286% ROI by using Team System to support a more efficient global development strategy and realign its internal software development assets. For details, see ROI Case Study Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and EDS.
• Dell realized a 225% ROI using Team Foundation Server to deploy a global source code management platform, which enables Dell to maintain a centralized repository for all source code and provide it to developers on a just-in-time basis regardless of their location. Improved source code management has also enabled Dell to consolidate its source code onto fewer servers, redeploy 100 system administrators, and improve the productivity of its developers. For details, see ROI Case Study Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Dell.

For more information, see Visual Studio Team System ROI Case Studies.

Get Started Today

Working with Microsoft or one of our worldwide partners, we can help you develop a joint solution roadmap for your organization to identify and prioritize skills development, process improvements, and tools infrastructure.

You can start today by:

• Learning more about the Team System solution
• Contacting a Microsoft Authorized Partner, or your regional Microsoft Sales Professional
• Taking the ALM Assessment to quickly identify key areas for improvement