Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) is a platform that helps software development teams to deliver complex software solutions more successfully. Not only does it provide software development lifecycle tools aimed at enforcing best practices for the different roles played by team members - project managers, architects, developers and testers - but it also provides an integration platform that improves communication and collaboration between team members throughout the entire development process. This course shows how VSTS caters to the needs of the different roles within a software development project and illustrates how VSTS enables collaboration between team members. It explains how each feature works, how it applies to each role and how and where it fits into the software development lifecycle.
We will show how project managers can create and manage a development project using VSTS and other related tools such as Excel and Project. In particular, we will focus on how to set up specific project methodologies, how to enforce the overarching policies that will be in place for the entire project, as well as how to manage and respond to reports generated by VSTS about the project's progress.
We will illustrate how software architects can use the VSTS tools for their phase of the project. This includes creating an application design that can be used to generate a code framework for the developers to implement, building a topological system design and building a deployment plan.
We will show how developers can use VSTS tools for authoring classes, placing code under source code control, building code, running unit tests and performing code analysis and coverage tests.
will investigate the VSTS tools on offer to the tester, in particular those for test case management, load testing, manual testing and web testing. We will also look at how test results can be collated and bugs can be tracked.
will also cover the core parts of the VSTS Team Foundation Server. It provides an infrastructure that acts as the glue allowing collaboration between the different project roles. In particular we will see how work items are used to represent all tasks within a project that have some kind of action associated with them - perhaps a document that needs authoring, code that needs developing or a bug that needs fixing - and how the source control system is used to hold all the files associated with the project. Features such as build automation, report generation and publication and the project portal for viewing project documentation will also be addressed.
Audience
If you are currently a member of a software development team - that is, you play one or more of the roles of project manager, architect, developer or tester - delivering solutions for the .NET platform then this is the course for you.
Prerequisistes
A familiarity with a .NET language (such as C# or VB.NET) would be useful. Some knowledge of XML might also be a help.
Course Outline
- Use VSTS to enforce best practices of software development
- Understand the VSTS tools and how and where they fit into the project lifecycle
- Learn how VSTS can be configured to use different software methodologies
- Use graphical modelling tools to create a system design and validate its deployment
- Employ test-driven development to produce robust code
- Harness the power of source control
- Learn how to manage testing and track bugs
- Learn how to script Web tests
- Learn how to manage load testing and establish a load testing rig
- Understand how to do data driven testing
- Understand how to extend Web tests to add your own rules
- Understand how to use generic testing to wrap other test frameworks
- Understand how to do manual testing
- Understand how to use source control in VSTS
- Understand branching and merging in source control
- Set up a project portal to access all project documentation
- Understand how the extensibility points of VSTS can be used to customize it to your companies needs
