Implementing a Custom Development Process

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.