Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) is a platform that helps software development teams to deliver complex software solutions more successfully. Not only does it provide software development lifecycle tools aimed at enforcing best practices for the different roles played by team members - project managers, architects, developers and testers - but it also provides an integration platform that improves communication and collaboration between team members throughout the entire development process. This course shows how VSTS caters to the needs of the different roles within a software development project and illustrates how VSTS enables collaboration between team members. It explains how each feature works, how it applies to each role and how and where it fits into the software development lifecycle.

What we'll cover:

Day 1
Introduction to VSTS
Project Management
Architecting a Solution
Source Code Control 1: Introduction

Day 2
Unit Testing 1: Test-driven Development
Unit Testing 2: Data-driven Testing
The Class Designer
Source Code Control 2: Branching, Merging, and Shelving

Day 3
Code Analysis 1: Static Code Analysis
Building Code 1: MSBuild
Code Analysis 2: Dynamic Code Analysis
Web Testing 1: Introduction

Day 4
Web Testing 2: Extended Web Testing
Load Testing
Manual and Generic Testing

Test Case Management

Day 5
Building Code 2: Team Build
VSTS Extensibility

We will illustrate how software architects can use the VSTS tools for their phase of the project. This includes creating an application design that can be used to generate a code framework for the developers to implement, building a topological system design and building a deployment plan.

We will show how developers can use VSTS tools for authoring classes, placing code under source code control, building code, running unit tests and performing code analysis and coverage tests.

We will investigate the VSTS tools offered to the tester, in particular those for test case management, load testing, manual testing and Web testing. We will also look at how test results can be collated and bugs can be tracked.

We will also cover the core parts of the VSTS Team Foundation Server. It provides an infrastructure that acts as the glue allowing collaboration between the different project roles. In particular we will see how work items are used to represent all tasks within a project that have some kind of action associated with them - perhaps a document that needs authoring, code that needs developing or a bug that needs fixing - and how the source control system is used to hold all the files associated with the project. Features such as build automation, report generation and publication and the project portal for viewing project documentation will also be addressed.

Wherever possible we will show how VSTS can be customized to fit in with a company's individual software processes and practices and how it can be integrated with third-party tools.