Visual Studio Aims At Structuring The Software Development ProcessVisual Studio Aims At Structuring The Software Development Process

Microsoft's next release of its Visual Studio .Net family of tools, its first release that will carry the label Team System, will include new capabilities for team coordination and collaborative development.

The goal is to make the sometimes unpredictable and chaotic process of software development into "a disciplined business process, like enterprise resource planning," said Rick LaPlante, general manager of Microsoft's Visual Studio Enterprise Tools, at Borland Corp.'s annual user group Monday in San Jose. He said enterprises have imposed highly structured processes on their supply-chain automation and can do likewise with their software development.

Visual Studio 2005 Team System is currently in its first beta or user test release. It will be available for general release by the middle of 2005, LaPlante said.

"How many of you have worked on a project that you knew was doomed, but your manager didn't?" LaPlante asked 1,100 developers attending the annual Borland developer event during a keynote address. LaPlante lead the response by raising his own hand. By his estimate, 40% of the members of a crowd of 1,100 raised their hands as well.

Software engineers can tell by the number of code modules being checked in, a mounting count of unresolved bugs, and the failure of successive code submissions to pass testing whether a software project is on track, LaPlante noted. But such indicators often remain invisible to project managers and upper-level managers because they don't see the same signs or don't know how to interpret them.

Visual Studio 2005 Team System will attempt to include features that make it more likely that what the developers know in their hearts also is visible to managers. The goal is to waste less effort on projects that cannot succeed and shift effort into those that can deliver the expected business benefit.

Visual Studio Team System will have a central, networked code database that will generate an audit trail of who's working on what code and what its status is. Defect or bug reports will be available to all members of the team, along with test results, granting greater visibility into the progress of a project, LaPlante said. Another way Microsoft will achieve predictability in Visual Studio Team System 2005 will be through integration with a new Borland product, CaliberRM, which can keep the requirements for an application linked to the Visual Studio design and developer tools in which it will be built. Keeping requirements alongside design models or blocks of source code lets members of a team scrutinize whether what's being built matches the requirements. In the past, requirements have tended to be isolated with individual team members working on a related part of the application.

CaliberRM also is able to precisely link a given requirement to the block of code intended to meet it. Such a feature is called "traceability," or tracing the requirements through an emerging system. "People today have to trade off predictability and productivity. We want to talk about predictability without a loss of productivity," he said.

LaPlante wasn't above taking a poke at a primary competitor, whom he identified as IBM with its large Global Services consulting division and Rational development tools unit. "If you have to go out and hire a consulting firm to figure out what you just installed," he said, "then you're using Rational tools."