By Greg DeMichillie [bio]
Posted: Oct. 31, 2005

Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) can be customized to support an organization's existing development processes and policies. For example, the ClearPath/NX Engineering Group at Unisys, a major Microsoft systems integrator and hardware vendor, is adopting VSTS for its Windows developers. This large, geographically-dispersed team creates Windows software components (such as database drivers) which must be integrated and tested with corresponding mainframe components. The team is subject to the same development policies used for the mainframe software. For example, components checked in for a build must be reviewed twice prior to build: first by a peer developer (the "reviewer"), and then by the manager responsible for the affected module (the "approver").

Unisys has an existing mainframe-based project management and source control system for managing the development process, but the system is not integrated with Windows source code control. A Windows developer checking in code has to remember to also update the mainframe system, which can cause steps to be missed. Also, the source code control system used for Windows components, Visual SourceSafe, has not scaled well, forcing developers to maintain as many as 17 separate source code repositories.

To address these problems, Unisys is moving to VSTS to support the Windows development team. It is building VSTS forms to capture the same change control information stored by the mainframe system and is creating VSTS work item classes and rules to implement processes such as code review. When a developer checks in code, for example, VSTS will automatically present a check-in form and generate a VSTS work item for the code's reviewer. It will notify the reviewer of the new work item and notify the original developer when the work item is marked complete by the reviewer. The mainframe system will be synchronized with VSTS through the Web services interfaces of Team Foundation Server, ensuring that both the mainframe system and VSTS have updated project status. Finally, the more scalable VSTS source code control system will enable Unisys to consolidate its Windows source code repositories. The result should be less work for developers and systems administrators, and a reduced chance that important process steps will be missed.