We have developed and delivered several SharePoint application projects to a client of ours who is operating in the oil and gas services business. Some of the applications, which we have developed include the following:
- AP automation
- Systems integration
- SharePoint Services for Business Intelligence, Workflow automations and Document management
As our Sharepoint application stack grew for this client, we faced the following issues:
- Tracking of bugs and tasks needed additional effort for the managers
- There was no clear traceability between issues logged and code update.
- Artifacts and documents were not up-to date
- Proper guidelines were not followed for methodologies and they were not standardized
- Monitoring the performance of resources was an overhead
- No synchronization within the Projects, task items, bugs and code changes
- Difficult to determine root cause of project success or failure
- Moving code from test to live systems caused several regression failures
To address these problems we did a detailed gap analysis and came up with the implementation of Team Foundation Server. TFS is a Microsoft product which provides Source code management, Project management and Issue portal management for the entire Application Lifecycle.
TFS is a central repository where the source codes of s/w applications, requirement documents and work items (like Project, Task, issues and Change Request etc.) can be stored in and maintained. Some of the interesting features are:
- Changes in source code can be linked to an issue for future reference. This is basically linking a change-set number to the issue number (explained in detail in upcoming blogs)
- The projects can be linked to the change requests. So it helps in synchronizing the timelines of projects with the number of change requests
- Reports can be generated for issue statuses to know the bug trends and burndown charts to estimate the deadline of a project.
In my next post i will talk about source code management using TFS server.
