The worst disasters in Web app design that we come across are usually the result of either a user interface design that took its data source connections for granted, or vice versa. Developers are often too much about logic and wow-factor and not enough about the logistics of data access. We need to be digging deep into the network side of things if we want a clean and efficient application.
Team System's response to this problem is a Logical Datacenter Designer, which integrates clients, Web servers, SQL Servers and any other servers into constrained, schema-driven models that permit solution architectures to truly embrace the big picture with proper attention to networking and its impact on interface with data sources. This concept is especially welcome as Web services become increasingly central to integrated application systems.
7. Software configuration management (SCM)
As projects grow more complex, the size of the disastrous pile-ups that result when code is poorly managed grows as well. Poor team communication makes it all the worse, and the lack of a well-constructed, high-level integration plan can lead to embarrassing compromises with requirements and user expectations, if not outright project failure. Software configuration management (SCM) is critical to project success today, and thankfully Team System includes it.
Source control is a given these days, but the extras included here are tracking of the work items and build management mentioned earlier. Work items covers tasks, bugs, requirements, risk, and the high-level scenario. These work items can be defined in your methodology (see #2), and have properties, making them rich objects for detailed project definition as you move through the development cycle. Your tracking of these items can be customised. Build management -- called Team Build, and based on MSBuild -- gives you a build customisation tool with compile, source control, unit testing, static analysis, binary routing, build reporting and test result reporting.
8. SharePoint Services -- create a team portal
More than a few IT shops are using SharePoint Services for team collaboration, for project tracking, sharing of documentation, even source control. Team System is a good fit for SharePoint. Versioning, check-in and -out, and security are built-in, and SharePoint is friendly to the other MS clients mentioned above.
9. Integrated testing
If you're going to design and implement from an architectural level, you need to be able to test from top to bottom. Unit testing we've already mentioned, but testing at the integration and system levels is usually done manually. Team System allows you to create and implement high-level tests and bug-tracking from Word templates that can be launched from Visual Studio 2005; there's still a human in the loop, but you can now give that process the continuity and depth that you have at the unit-test level. You also have a Generic Test Designer for creating tests that wrap other testing tools and record the results. You also have Web Test Recorder, which launches from Visual Studio and runs on Internet Explorer and captures a tester's navigation when testing Web sites.
10. System Designer
Lest it seem as though the whole point of VS/TS is to immerse you in the big picture, you can take comfort in the System Designer, which breaks an integrated application down into the Smallest Deployable Unit, whatever that might be in your particular project. The idea is to keep the components of a large application system manageable -- hard to do under the best of circumstances, in a multi-tiered system -- and yet maintain project-wide continuity throughout development.
The increased granularity at the System Designer level allows you to develop and test between components forming subsystems, in the process overriding configurations and definitions at the higher project level, if need be, and then disseminating those changes at the application level. Or, if needed, you can store the overrides for later comparison and examination, until ideal deployments at the subsystem level emerge.
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It's too bad that after looking at this article and Microsoft's webpage for the product for a good ten minutes I still can't figure out what this product is or what it does for me.
Why are products like this always described in the vaguest possible terms?