For dummies, Visual Studio Team System, or VSTS, as I (and most of the .NET evangelists) call it, is the latest addition to the bag of Visual Studio goodies.

VSTS encorporates the missing jewels in the development toolkit of Microsoft to tranform it to a world-class solution development kit. Earlier, the kitty contained only development tools like Visual Studio, a configuration management tool, Visual SourceSafe, and Microsoft Project, for project management.

This kitty has now been expanded to provide tools useful throughout product development lifecycle, but the onus lies on the fact that these tools are tightly integrated so that one phase can be seamlessly projected across different tools.

So why now? Well, I believe that Redmond realized that there is more to software development than just writing code in the IDE. Rather, it is about product lifecycle management that needs to be focued on if we are develop great products.

Voila! We have VSTS.

VSTS comes in various flavors, each focusing a major role which occupy the responsibility in the PDLC (Product development life cycle). Thus we have the following avatars:

a. Architects: Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Architects : It comes with a set of Distributed System designers  that help reduce the complexity of developing and deploying service-oriented applications.

b. Developers: Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Developers : Tools like PreFast and FxCop help detect coding and security related issues earlier in the development lifecycle thus reducing the cost of fixing defects later on in the project.

c. Testers: Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Testers: There are tools for web testing, load testing, manual testing and unit testing are tightly intergrated in the Visual Studio environment.

d. Project Managers: Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Project Managers: VS2005 collects all the work items of the project in a single server-side database which the whole team can share.

e. Team Development: Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Team Development : We have more tightly integrated source control, work item tracking, reporting and custom policies so as to maintain confirmity with the project policies.

More on VSTS in the upcoming posts.