All that Team System

Say anything about Microsoft Team System and chances are you will be wrong because your information and/or understanding of Team System is incomplete.

Version Control is all new. Most of what you know based on SourceSafe no longer applies. Much of the rationale for using alternative version control systems is no longer true. Keep your eye on changesets.

Risk Tracking is a new feature introduced with Team System. You may have developed or purchased a separate system for this. You will have to reconsider because this Risk Tracking system is natively integrated with Version Control.

Bug Tracking is also a new feature of the Team System. Again you may already have one in place. And again you will have to reconsider because the Bug Tracking system is natively integrated with Risk Tracking and Version Control. Notice a pattern? It goes deeper recall those changesets that Version Control uses? The resolution for a bug can include links to the changeset that fixed the bug.

Work Item tracking follows the same story, integrates with Bug Tracking, integrates with Risk Tracking, integrates with Version Control. Again huge benefits from linking the changesets that satisfy the Work Item.

Unit Testing, Regression Testing, Performance Testing, Environment Testing; again integration with all the rest of Team System.

Likewise the Build features of Team System.

Now it is possible that you have cobbled together a collection of systems that do all of these things. Perhaps you have even integrated them and managed to get them to work together. If this is the case then there are two very probable outcomes. One is that significant effort goes into keeping the patch work collection of systems working. If not then certain quirks, annoyances and bugs is just tolerated and worked around on a daily basis.

But that isn't the end of the story. There are more features to Team System, plus we just got an update with version 2008 that contains even more. One could despair of ever catching up on this one offering from Microsoft.

But there is hope. When Visual Studio came out there was a similar flood of features, and with each new version of Visual Studio more tools were added. We never caught up with Visual Studio. In a way we never had to catch up. We just started using it. The more we learned the more efficient we worked. It was always a balancing act between getting it done and spending time learning how to do it easier. We survived the Visual Studio feature flood. We will survive the Team System feature flood. And what a great problem to have!

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