Award-winning Microsoft Gold Certified Partner The Henson Group, Inc. (THG), provides expert consulting and training for developers leveraging Microsoft Visual Studio Team System.
The new Microsoft Visual Studio Team System offers tightly integrated and extensible tools that enable software development teams to reduce the complexity of development and improve communication and collaboration throughout the development process.
The Visual Studio Team System also includes the Microsoft Solutions Framework, which provides a set of proven software development processes that help organizations deliver enterprise-ready solutions.
(See further down for service descriptions.)
Improving the Software Development Life Cycle
When Microsoft first released Visual Basic, it made Windows software development available to the masses by reducing its complexity. With Visual Basic 6.0, Microsoft enabled millions of developers to quickly develop client/server applications. Recently, with Visual Studio .NET, Microsoft provided developers with the tools and technology to easily develop distributed applications.
With Visual Studio 2005 Team System, Microsoft is addressing the growing complexities of applications and the life cycle required to design, develop, and deploy them by providing the tools and guidance needed to enable predictable, repeatable results without trading off productivity and innovation.
Communication: Visual Studio Team System focuses on enabling better communication by reducing the overhead of reporting and by opening new channels of communication between team members. For example:
Simplified reporting is achieved by automating the collection of information from the tools that team members use. Data gathered from Visual Studio Team System is persisted in a data warehouse that enables reporting and visibility of project status to all members of the software development team and beyond.
Project managers can translate customer requirements into work items for the development team and subsequently track the status of the work items to monitor project status.
The Distributed System Designers translate application development and deployment requirements into a common language (SDM) that allows developers and operations to communicate.
Integrated Tools: The success of Visual Studio has proven that developers prefer an integrated development environment with ready access to the tools they need. Visual Studio Team System builds on this success by incorporating the testing and performance tools that developers require into the development environment, such as unit testing, code analysis and performance profiling. This enables developers to improve the quality of their code earlier in the life cycle without disrupting the way they work today. By equipping developers with the tools they need to identify and address quality issues early, more product defects are identified and fixed when it is cheapest to do so.
Simplified, Integrated Workflow and Process: With Visual Studio Team System, process is not just documentation. It also manifests itself as actual tool behavior changes. When you chose the process at project inception, you are also choosing the workflow and work products, which then drive how the system behaves. Support for the SDLC process is built-in, which makes for seamless workflow support. By integrating process into the tools team members use on a daily basis, Visual Studio Team System lowers the barrier to adopting process and enables the automatic collection of cross-functional project metrics without the overhead associated with manual reporting.
Increased Return on Investment: It is with improvements in communication and productivity that business will realize increased ROI for their investment in SDLC tools and processes. Visual Studio Team System provides a cost effective solution to managing the software development life cycle through its use of widespread integration across all of the SDLC tools. By providing a cohesive toolset and building on existing knowledge, Visual Studio Team System provides an approachable environment that helps software development teams be productive without requiring mastery of unnecessarily complex concepts and rigid tools.
The Henson Group offers expertise with the following Microsoft Visual Studio Team System products:
- Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite: Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite is a productive, integrated, and extensible suite of lifecycle tools that expands the Visual Studio product line to enable greater communication and collaboration among software development teams. With Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite organizations can ensure greater predictability and quality early and often throughout the development process.
- Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects: Team Edition for Software Architects provides tools for visually constructing solutions that are designed from the onset for the environments in which they will be used allowing teams to develop and deploy applications faster and more effectively. The modeling framework allows architects to visualize prescribed architectures and network infrastructures.
-Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers: Team Edition for Software Developers provides advanced development tools that enable teams to incorporate quality, early and often throughout the life cycle. Performance analysis tools measure, evaluate, and target performance-related issues in code, helping identify performance bottle-necks early on.
-Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers: Team Edition for Software Testers introduces a set of test tools that are integrated into the Visual Studio environment. These tools allow testers to author, execute, and manage tests and related work items all from within Visual Studio.
Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server: Team Foundation Server is what powers the collaboration aspects of the Visual Studio Team System. When used in conjunction with Visual Studio Team System, Team Foundation Server enable you to effortlessly manage and track the progress and health of your projects.
• Visual Studio 2005 Team Test Load Agent
Team Test Load Agent generates supplemental test load for use with Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers at enables organizations to simulate more users and more accurately test the performance of Web applications and servers.