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Configuration identification: This is often reffered as the process of recognizing the baseline applicability to a set of configuration items. It refers both not only to source, but all documents that contribute to the baseline. Examples are:
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· All code files |
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· Compilers |
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· Compile / build scripts |
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· Installation and configuration files |
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· Inspection lists |
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· Design documents |
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· Test reports |
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· Manuals |
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· System configurations (e.g. version of compiler used) | Team System provides this capability through the concept of Work Item Tracking. A work item can define any unit of information that is part of the software development lifecycle. It can be any of the abovementioned Configuration Items. A powerful feature of Team System is that you can link work items to other artifacts, this allows your developers and manager to track which changes are related to which requirements, bugs.
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Configuration Control: Refers to the policy, rules, procedures, information, activities, roles, authorization levels, and states relating to the creation, updates, approvals, tracking and archiving of items involved with the implementation of a change request.
With Team System policies can be created and enabled inside Visual Studio that will enforce following standard check-in conditions, as well as others:
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· Clean Build: The project must compile without errors before check-in. |
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· Statis Analyses: Static analyses must be run before check-in |
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· Testing Policy: Smoke-tests, unit-tests must be run before check-in |
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· Work Items: On ore more work items must be associated with the check in. | You can also configure Team System to trak additional check in notes. The standard notes in MSF Agile are: Security Reviewer, Code Reviewer and Performance Reviewer. As with the most part of Team System, this is again fully custumizable.
Roles and authorization levels are covered by Team System Security. By locking down privileged operations to only a few members, you can ensure that the roles within your team are always enforced. You can for example specify which team members can administer, start or resume a build and so much more.
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Status accounting: Recording and reporting the status of components and change requests and gathering vital statistics about components in the product.
Team System is hosted on SQL Server 2005 and its built-in reporting capabilities. As many as 50 pre-built reports are expected to ship with the release of Team System. These will include reports on: Project health, code churn, test pass, test coverage, active bugs,... These reports are directly available from the Reporting Services report manager portal or can be viewed on the project portal.
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Configuration verification and audit: Verify that a product’s requirements have been met and the product design that meets those requirements has been accurately documented before a product configuration is released.Before acceptance into the live environment, new Releases, builds, equipment and standards should be verified against the contracted or specified requirements.
This is where the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) comes into play. DSI is a way to design for deployment or to put it in another way to design for operations. Key features of DSI are:
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· The visualization of systems and services |
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· tracking of each system or service to properly describe it to another system or service. | It will in other words allow solution architect's to validate their design against an infrastructure architects's datacenter design and visa versa. The first Microsoft implementation of DSI will be called the System Definition Model (SDM). SDM describes your application and its deployment environment in layers. The following layers are defined:
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· Application |
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· Application Hosting |
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· Logical Machines and Network Topology |
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· Hardware | Microsoft will furter expand on their Dynamic Systems Initiative and will utilize the SDM model in Systems Managment Server(SMS) and Microsoft Operations Manager(MOM).
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Build management: Manage the processes and tools that are used to create a repeatable and automatic build.
Team System's Team Build provides an out-of-the-box solution to meet following requirements:
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· Get source code files for the build from the source code repository |
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· Run static code analysis |
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· Compile sources |
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· Run unit tests |
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· Save code churn, code coverage and other build information |
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· Copy the binaries to a predefined location |
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· Generate reports | The build automation tool in Team System provides you with an out-of-the box solution to meet these requirements. The wizard helps you create an automated build script. Since the execution engine of Team Build is MSBuild, you can customize the process and accomplish any number of custom tasks.
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Process management: Enforces consistent processes and promotes user accountability across the application life cycle, resulting in communication and productivity improvements enterprise-wide.
Team System will include two Microsoft Solution Framework(MSF) methodologies:
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· MSF for Agile Software Development |
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· MSF for CMMI improvement | While in MSF Agile it is more important to respond to change than to follow a plan, it is my understanding that MSF for CMMI process improvement is the only MSF methodology that fully provides process management support. It is an excellent process to use on your project if your company is looking to achieve a measured, baseline competency in software development. In short it will bring the process management side of the application lifecycle to your company and project.
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Teamwork: Controlling the work and interactions between multiple developers on a product.
One of the great advantages of the fact that Team System is such a highly integrated environment, is that it can instantly improve the communication on your team. All members of a team need to be in sync, watching their managers and need to work together to get their assignments done in time. Managers can always consult what the state of the project is, how much code churn is in the nightly builds, when the project has reached zero bugs,... Your team must constantly manage the same requirements, tasks, source, code bugs and reports. Because of the ways these are integrated in Team System it will automatically strengthen the communication pathways of your team and software.
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