Visual Studio 2010 is going to be available in just two months from now, on April 12th, 2010. Some of the things that customers are continually asking from us in the ALM space is that VS 2010 provides is more support for requirements and tests management. These two parts had lower presence in previous versions of Visual Studio Team System but looking at VS 2010, we can definitely see great progress there with regards to new functionalities and scenarios.
In the following link, you can find a slide deck shared by Siddharth Bhatia from the product team that provides an overview and a walkthrough of a typical project that start from the requirements gathering which can be gathered with Word, Visio, Business Analyst view in MOSS, Excel and even Visual Studio.
The scenario continues to the project management using a new Tab in MS Project called the “Team Planner Tools”.
In the next phase a new tool called the “Test and Lab Manager” allows to create test cases and connect them to requirements and run the test from within the same tool.
After we have all these details stored in the Team Foundation Server 2010, it is possible to get different views in reports and dashboards such as progress roll-up on requirements and user stories, quality of requirements using traceability and bugs linked to requirements. All of this is gathered from the requirements and tests data.
To summarize, the slide deck contains more screenshots and important information about the entire process. In addition, this scenario can be used also for non MS development environments. The only thing that will need to change is that we shall not use Visual Studio as a client but rather a plug-in to other environments such as TeamPrise for Eclipse. Another possibility is to use the Visual Studio Team Explorer which is a thin client which doesn’t allow development but allows connectivity with the requirements, defects, builds, reports and all of the project data in addition to the office based clients. This is important to remember when applying this scenario in a Non-MS Development environment.