Licensing MSDN Throughout the Application's Development Life Cycle

At different times throughout an application’s development life cycle, different team members will use different MSDN editions to license software and services for development and testing. The development life-cycle stages are shown on the left of the illustration. The development team is shown in the top center of the illustration. The software and services in the development lab are shown on the top right. The application in production is shown below the development team and the development lab.

When the application development project is being initiated, a small team may need to evaluate the software and services the application requires and build the development lab. Here an Architect (Arch), Developer Lead (Dev Lead), and Operations (Ops) team member are represented, with the appropriate MSDN subscription. For example, the Architect might need MSDN with Visual Studio Ultimate (MSDN VS Ult), while the Ops person setting up the development lab might only need MSDN Platforms edition (MSDN Plat) to install and configure Windows Server (WS), SQL Server (SQL), and Team Foundation Server (TFS).