Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server
By using the suite of tools in Visual Studio 2012, and combining those tools with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, you can apply proven practices to manage your application's lifecycle, from understanding customer needs through code design and implementation to deployment. You can use the instrumentation in these tools to trace requirements to checked-in code, builds and test results. These practices can help your team create software that is valued by your customers and that is faster and more reliable. You can use these tools to achieve the following results:
Plan and Track: Capture what is important to your customers, and track your project's progress. Enact processes and monitor their quality to help your team turn customer requirements into working software. |
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Design: Design functionality either on top of existing assets or from scratch, using architectural diagrams to communicate critical information about your team's software. |
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Develop: Write, unit test, debug, analyze, and profile your application using tools that are integrated with the rest of the application lifecycle so that your team can understand how your progress contributes to the project. |
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Build: Build your application using the integrated build system so that your team can ensure quality gates are met and see what requirements have been fulfilled in each build. |
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Test: Run manual or automated tests, including performance and stress tests. Manage testing systematically so that your team knows the software quality on any given day. |
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Lab Management: Using Microsoft Test Manager you can create lab environments on which to run tests on either physical computers or on virtual machines. Virtual machines can run on any virtualization framework that is managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). |
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Deploy: Deploy into virtual environments to enable more sophisticated development and testing. |
To start to use these tools, see Adopting Visual Studio for Application Lifecycle Management Incrementally. For information about how to use these tools with Eclipse, see Adopting Team Explorer Everywhere.
To administer Team Foundation Server, see Administering Team Foundation and Technical Reference for Team Foundation.
Team Foundation Server
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, the core of the application lifecycle management tools, provides version control, a build system, and tools and metrics for managing and organizing projects. With a license for Team Explorer, you can view and update data in Team Foundation Server by using Team Web Access, Visual Studio and other integrated development environments.
For more information about clients for Team Foundation Server, see Working with Team Foundation Clients.
Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management
You can integrate other aspects of the application development lifecycle with Team Foundation Server by using one or more of the following products:
Visual Studio Professional is a unified development experience that enables developers to create multi-tier applications across the web, cloud, and devices. It provides the ability to maintain and modernize existing applications while building cutting-edge apps for new platforms such as Windows 8.
Visual Studio Premium offers an integrated ALM solution to bring together stakeholders, users, and software development functions to deliver compelling applications as a unified team. Businesses of all sizes require collaboration across a diverse set of team players, often working in heterogeneous development environments, to deliver software applications with agility that yield predictable value. Visual Studio Premium provides business analysts, project managers and testers, alongside developers and users, with the tools to integrate their processes and collaborate seamlessly. It comprises agile project planning and management, stakeholder and user engagement, developer productivity, and quality enablement and testing capabilities to deliver an integrated ALM solution.
Visual Studio Ultimate is the comprehensive ALM offering for organizations developing and operating highly scalable software applications and services. It provides architecture discovery and validation tools that enable teams to maintain a high degree of architectural integrity and efficiently manage technical debt. Quality of Service testing tools helps proactively validate the scalability of software applications and services in meeting the target scaling requirements. Incident management and production debugging seamlessly integrate development and operations teams in releasing, monitoring, and maintaining applications in production.
Visual Studio Test Professional is ideal for testers, business analysts, product managers, and other stakeholders who need team collaboration tools, but not a full development IDE. These team members can take advantage of an integrated testing and product management toolset that delivers quality across the development process. Visual Studio Test Professional also supports lightweight requirements definition and continuous customer feedback, and provides traceability across these processes.
The following table shows how these tools can be used throughout the application lifecycle. For more information about detailed feature availability, see Visual Studio 2012 Comparison.
Application Lifecycle |
Visual Studio Professional 2012 |
Visual Studio Premium 2012 |
Visual Studio Ultimate 2012 |
Visual Studio Test Professional 2012 |
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Agile planning tools |
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Architecture, Modeling, and Design |
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Development |
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Test (1) |
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Lab Management |
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Build |
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Version Control |
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Work Item Tracking |
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Notes:
- Microsoft Test Manager enables you to manage and execute test cases outside Visual Studio, and create and manage physical or virtual environments. This client application installs with Visual Studio Premium 2012, Visual Studio Ultimate 2012, and Visual Studio Test Professional 2012.