Making a Case for TFS

Successful software projects manifest themselves when teams work together. When a team has good communication and transparency, it tends to find problems sooner. Teams want to come to work and are excited about what they’re building when things are going right. They want to focus on getting work done as efficiently as possible. Today, many successful projects are using agile techniques. The bottom line is business decision makers want success but don’t want to spend tons of money or an exuberant amount of time managing projects.

Simply put, project management has often been about magic formulas and predictions without regard for team dynamics. Detached individuals providing unrealistic schedules based upon inaccurate data not only increases confusion but also complexity as well. Add to that micromanagement and a disregard for the humans—they’re people not resources and you have a project ripe for failure.

To complicate this process even further, in the past there’s been a general lack of good, integrated tools available for teams to utilize. This has made it difficult for the development leads and leaders to (a) plan accurately in order to deliver on time, (b) have visibility into the project as it is running to discover indicators of potential issues, and (c) easily report on project status and health during and after the project.

If you can hear the sounds of the Agile Manifesto ringing in your ears then you’re not alone. In the industry, we’ve found many ways to get work done. The Manifesto calls them out well: individuals over processes; working software over documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; responding to change over following a plan. Whether you’re doing agile or not, you want to focus on people with respect to the team and customers which ultimately leads to shipping working software on time and under budget.

Visual Studio (VS) 2010 and Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 mixed with agile can help bring success to the team. Since I’ve been using both of these products for quite some time now I can definitely say without a doubt that these tools will enable developers to develop and help project managers easily plan projects. This integrated set of tools lets you leverage historical data so you can continuously improve your planning effort. They help you gain visibility into projects in flight. This provides easy discovery of indicators of potential issues and it lets you report on project status and health with an integrated application lifecycle management solution. This ensures you won’t be disrupted, or disrupt others, in order to provide information about the project to key stakeholders, thus successfully delivering on those commitments set fourth at the beginning of the project.

Please visit this link for more information on VS and TFS.