A very exciting day for the Visual Studio community and customer base. VS2010 has an amazing amount of functionality, but what I’d like to highlight today is Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) Basic. Check out Jason Zander’s post which highlights the three components of TFS Basic (Source Control, Work Item Tracking, and Build): http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/10/02/announcing-tfs-basic.aspx.
I titled this entry “Visual Studio 2010: TFS for Big and Small” because the 2005 and 2008 were great for larger teams, but I have met countless people at conferences and customers that believed TFS was too big of a jump for their team. As a result they would decide to use no source control system (file system and email) or stick to SourceSafe. Even small teams complained about the limits of SourceSafe and wished for something better.
Moving into the new world from SourceSafe is great, but what I believe is really exciting is the beginning of ALM for smaller teams, which is how ALM adoption usually starts. From what I’ve seen the first step teams take is source control which is followed by builds. Work Item Tracking is the engine that starts to bring in the extended team (i.e. implementing Agile Project Management/Scrum).
I mention that ALM adoption is usually started at the small team level because it’s either started from smaller teams within bigger teams (pilot projects or early adopters who push the team) or just generally smaller teams (<10 people). Becoming familiar with TFS is incredibly important to wrapping your mind around it. Install TFS Basic on your client machine and use it for some of your projects. Remember, small teams grow quickly with successful projects!