Project Management Comes to Visual Studio

New features of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) will help project managers in two ways: a set of built-in reports will allow project managers to see project status quickly, and a set of extensible methodologies will provide specific guidance on how to organize and track a software development project. The reporting tools are useful for any development project that uses VSTS’s source-code control and work-item tracking systems. The methodologies, however, will require organizations to either adopt a specific way of managing their projects or modify the provided methodologies to suit their specific needs.

(For background information on VSTS, including its architecture, see “Team System Targets Multiple Roles“.)

Tools for Project Managers

Many software project managers spend a great deal of time collecting status information from individual developers and testers and trying to collate that information into a useful report. Development teams using the VSTS source-code control system and work-item tracking databases will find that much of that data collection is performed automatically, allowing project managers to perform higher-level tasks such as analyzing trends or transferring work from one developer to another to equalize work loads.