Eric lippert - Amazon Web Services

Team foundation server
Team Foundation Server
Extending Team Foundation
Server 2012
ALM MVP Subodh Sohoni shows us the various extensibility points available
in TFS and how to leverage them to align TFS to (existing) processes instead
of the other way round!
S
ervices of Team Foundation
Server 2012 (TFS 2012) have
a rich set of features to
support generic application
lifecycle management out of box. These
services are to provide support of version
control, build management and project
management through work item tracking.
In addition to these core services, TFS
2012 also offers reporting of data
generated during development activities
and a collaboration portal for each
software project undertaken by the team.
It supports the process models based
upon CMMI, Agile and Scrum.
All these features are provided with
certain default settings. These settings of
the features make TFS behave in a certain
way. It is the way these features are
commonly used. But, it is also true that
the way each feature is designed, cannot
satisfy everyone’s requirement. In fact,
more the generic nature of these features,
more are the chances that it may not
satisfy anyone. The way organizations
behave are, as per the set processes that
they have implemented over the years
and those processes may not be
supported by the default behaviour of
TFS. It is possible that those processes
have evolved over the lifetime of the
organization and embodies the decisions
made during each unique situation that
the organizations passed through. It is
very difficult to say if processes
followed by an organization are wrong,
although those may not be exactly as
implemented in TFS. Processes often
gives a unique identity to the
organization and those should not be
changed if those processes are working
for that organization. Tools like TFS may
provide efficient ways to implement the
same processes and flexibility of the tool
to accommodate various processes of the
organization, becomes its strength. TFS
2012 does provide many different
opportunities to us to extend its services,
so that we may implement specific and
not just standard processes with it.
Start of the implementation of a process
is with the Process Template which is a
set of configurations that are applied to a
team project when it is created. It
provides configuration of TFS 2012 that
has pre-built process templates and
supports implementation of CMMI, Agile
and Scrum. Organizations can pick any
one of them as a starting point but need
not be satisfied with settings that are out
of box.
The strongest point of these process
templates is that they are customizable. It
is possible to:
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