Distributed Development

The world is becoming a smaller place every day.

 

With economic globalization, geographic distances in the business world are becoming more and more irrelevant, particularly if you think about the information world. Gone are the days when developers in a team were located on the same floor in the same building. It is now more and more common to find teams scattered not only across a particular city, but also across continents. Distributed development is here to stay. Team members are no longer within shouting distance but they sure can hear each other loud and clear via broad band connections.

At Microsoft, we've been very successful in delivering tools that help with the individual user's productivity. With the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), our mission is to extend our leadership in productive developer tools to ensuring greater team efficiency and productivity. One of our primary goals while designing Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) was to enable geographically distributed teams to be as productive as co-located teams. The Team Foundation Server (TFS) provides the server aspect of VSTS. TFS provides collaboration capabilities for source code control, change management, issue tracking etc.

In the spirit of self-hosting (or as we like to call it internally as dog-fooding), we use Team System internally in parts of Microsoft’s Developer Division because we have teams in Redmond, North Carolina, Fargo, Hyderabad, Copenhagen and even one guy in Alaska that all need to work collaboratively.

Namaste!