Team Foundation Server Benefits

This isn’t a technical blog posting, but instead I’d like to try and help provide a short summary of the general benefits that Team Foundation Server (TFS) can provide. Why? You may have a clear view of the technical capabilities of TFS but would also like a summary of the more general benefits.

I’ve listed what I see as the key “non-technical” benefits:

Manage team workflow

TFS provides a single, consolidated, integrated location for all work items (e.g. requirements, change requests, defects or tasks). This not only avoids disparate locations for these (documents, spreadsheets, silo’d tools) but also increases team collaboration and communication and means that metrics from the work items can be collected automatically, providing the data for…

real-time decisions

Collecting status information on projects and presenting that data to interested parties is time consuming, error prone and requires significant effort. By reporting on data collected automatically by TFS team members don’t need to spend time summarising their status to Project Managers, Project Managers can spend less time preparing reports and more time managing and other stakeholders can have greater visibility of the project.

Drive predictability

Having an established (but not implying a fixed or onerous) development process helps teams to get on with the job of delivering working software. Supporting that process in the tooling helps drive predictability by letting the team focus on delivery rather than on tools and infrastructure support. Accurate trend reporting also highlights whether releases are on schedule, helping to avoid “surprises” at releases.

Deliver Early, Deliver Often, Drive quality

Aside from the specific quality capabilities of the Developer Edition (code coverage, analysis, metrics, profiling) and the Test Edition (manual, web and load testing) TFS itself can drive integration and quality assurance through a combination of check-in policies enforcing quality gates on code to be checked into source control and automated build (don’t wait to find out if the codebase compiles) with unit and other automated tests. Together these help identify issues as early as you can in your development cycle.

Use familiar tools

TFS provides all of these capabilities without the need to move away from your existing, familiar tools. This includes Visual Studio, Project and Excel, all of which are integrated with TFS. For teams or team members using other solutions, technologies or platforms there are a number of options including the Windows Explorer TFS integration, the Teamprise integration into Eclipse and other point integrations such as the TFS integration with HP Quality Center.

Cheers
Giles