Great Article on TFS and VSTS Best Practices

  • Article

Technorati tags: TFS Guidance, VSTS Guidance

A lot of you probably get MSDN Flash, or subscribe to FTPOnline (but in case you don't), I thought it did a great job of pinpointing some of the best features of TFS and how best to leverage them.  Sometimes people get a bit overwhelmed by all of the features and functionality that Visual Studio Team System and TFS have to offer.  Where do you start?  What if your team is too small or you're far too entrenched to take on a full ALM approach?  Well, you don't have to.  I have said this many, many times, but here is an approachable way to actually DO just that.  To summarize his 5 main points:

  1. Start off small. Implement TFS as a version-control tool and take advantage of work-item tracking.
  2. Ensure that you can write unit tests to verify a given requirement.
  3. Perform unit testing daily, using Continuous Integration if possible.
  4. Even if you are using an external build tool (such as Automated QA or NUnit), launch your builds using Team Build so that you can capture metrics.
  5. Gradually incorporate nightly builds. Try running nightly builds on a single assembly, and then add in more code if things are working well.

Before you know it, you'll be taking full advantage of the many other capabilities of VSTS ands TFS to manage your projects and reaping the rewards :)   Read more of Jeff Levinson's article "5 Best Practices to Improve Process and Methodology": https://www.ftponline.com/channels/net/2007_06/jlevinson/