EDS

Global IT Firm Improves Teamwork, Lowers Risk with Distributed-Server Development

EDS provides technology services and business solutions to its customers all over the world. With headquarters in Plano, Texas, the company employs an international group of expert developers, software architects, project managers, and other business and technical professionals. EDS has nine Centers of Expertise for its Microsoft® .NET Framework developers in various locations, from India to Wales. EDS recognized that a distributed-server model would better serve these Centers and minimize the risks associated with centralized systems. EDS turned to Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server. In just four months, a development team of five implemented the system and attained new levels of extensibility for EDS. Now EDS developers efficiently and effectively act as a true team, regardless of where they are located.

Situation

A founder in the IT outsourcing industry, EDS is a leading global technology services company with headquarters in Plano, Texas. The company’s 120,000 employees deliver IT and business outsourcing services to clients in a variety of industries, including manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, communications, energy, transportation, government, and consumer retail.

Developer productivity increases when you’re using the latest tools, such as Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server. It’s our belief that this environment is much more productive than a Java environment. Jim Hughes, Global Capacity Manager, EDS

EDS is a large-scale international company with three regional sites: the Americas; Asia Pacific; and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Within each region, EDS provides Centers of Expertise—locations that host EDS employees who specialize in development, architecture, infrastructure, and project management. While some Centers of Expertise focus on a specific industry, others focus on technology. Recently, EDS identified nine centers around the world that would specialize in creating solutions built on the Microsoft® .NET Framework and related technologies. These centers are strategically located so that development work on any related project can be completed 24 hours a day.

To promote more effective collaboration and to make it easier to standardize on best practices, EDS decided to use Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server as their development platform.

Because each broad region maintains its own IT infrastructure, EDS felt that it needed to implement a distributed-server model and provide each region with its own server.

“A distributed-server model would benefit us in various ways,” explains Jim Hughes, Global Capability Manager with EDS, “First, we minimize risk because we don’t have ‘all our eggs in one basket’ or, in this case, all of our data on a single server. In addition, a distributed-server model minimizes latency time on the network.”

Another issue that individual development teams needed to address was the lack of tools to track projects appropriately as management struggled to properly allocate development team members to projects.

“Consistent check-in systems for the developers for different projects were virtually nonexistent,” says Aaron Kowall, Chief Technologist for EDS. “The application of the standards was manual and at a project-level, so if members of the .NET development team were out of sync with the standard, there was no way to quickly get them back in sync.”
EDS turned to Microsoft as a partner to help design a system that would help:

• Enable teams to work together efficiently and effectively.
• Extend easily to meet future growth needs.
• Support new standards for managing and tracking projects that EDS wants to employ.

“Risk management was a key issue,” says Bijan Javidi, Solutions Architect for Microsoft. “We needed to find out how EDS could manage multiple servers while keeping its overall risk low.”

Solution

EDS, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, teamed with Microsoft to develop a solution that would create a distributed-development environment for its Microsoft .NET Framework Centers of Expertise. The solution consisted of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, a part of the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System.

Visual Studio Team System extends from the developer to the entire development team by delivering powerful, new role-based tools for software architects, developers, testers, and project managers. Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server is an extensible team collaboration server that enables all members of the extended IT team to manage and track the progress and health of projects.

Building the Distributed-Server Model
EDS as part of its Agility Alliance with Microsoft, started the project in April 2006 and completed it just four months later. The development team consisted of three developers, one software architect, and one infrastructure IT employee. The team used Visual C#® and the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, and the Visual Studio Software Development Kit along with Visual Studio 2005 and the Visual

Figure 1. The relationship between the central server and the three regional servers

Studio Team Foundation Server.

The team worked closely with Microsoft, following a specific Microsoft Project Charter that listed scope, vision, deliverables, and other important aspects of the solution. The project was the first global enterprise level deployment involving Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

“This solution is a collaboration of Microsoft and EDS,” says Kowall. “With the power of the .NET Framework, Visual Studio Team System, and Team Foundation Server, we created a distributed model that meets our technical and business needs.”

To create a distributed-server model, EDS implemented four Team Foundation Servers. As shown in Figure 1, the central Team
Foundation Server manages and collects project data, and then distributes information to three regional Team Foundation Servers. Depending on their physical locations, developers can now work with the data stored on one of those regional servers.

Using Customization, Tracking, and Build Automation Features
Team Foundation Server provides a way for EDS’s developers to customize as they define data for a team project. For example, EDS developers can use Work Items in Team Foundation Server to define and attach documents to each work item. The development team can also use corporate custom check-in policies to allow team
members to check in specific information.
Kowall says, “We achieve tight integration with Team Foundation Server, and we avoid all of the context switching that can happen when you’re using a toolset that isn’t integrated as well as Team Foundation Server. It’s the perfect platform for our distributed team and works well over our wide area network.”

Team Foundation Server enables developers, architects, and testers at each      of the Centers of Expertise to effortlessly manage and track the progress of our critical projects … Aaron Kowall, Chief Technologist , EDS

Build automation is another helpful feature that allows EDS to get standardized build processes implemented easily. “Being able to build a report that shows the associated work items and change sets is an excellent feature,” says Kowall. “We used to have to generate these reports manually, which was tedious and costly.”

Benefits

Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server provide the comprehensive set of tools that EDS needs for its new distributed solution. Both products provide the extensibility that EDS needs to accommodate future growth with ease. In addition, EDS development teams are able to work together more efficiently and effectively, while the new model reduces overall risk to the company.

“Team Foundation Server enables developers, architects, and testers at each of the Centers of Expertise to effortlessly manage and track the progress of our critical projects,” says Kowall. “We use the work-item tracking, configuration management, and other collaboration features. Based on the new delivery model, Team Foundation Server provided the most seamless, integrated work environment for the .NET Centers of Expertise.”

Simplifies Extensibility, Supports Growth
Today, EDS enjoys a flexible, extensible distributed model that will aptly support around 600 developers in its .NET Centers of Expertise and around 2,000 developers working at customer sites. Moving forward, EDS anticipates using Team Foundation Server as a lifecycle tool for other projects not related to the .NET Centers of Expertise. With Team Foundation Server, the company now has a solid model and the infrastructure to manage multiple servers as a single environment that doesn’t require individual server maintenance and management.

“In assessing the number of developers in our worldwide locations, as well as the number of projects we would be putting on the servers, we knew we couldn’t survive without a scalable solution,” says Kowall. “Some of this replication and distribution will be an automatic process, and adding additional Team Foundation Servers in another county won’t have to be a specialized project—it can be an automatic, repeatable process.”

Fosters Teamwork, Productivity
With Team Foundation Server, EDS developers can more efficiently and effectively communicate, collaborate, and track progress on their projects—no matter what their geographic location.

“The basic functionality in Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server is team-oriented,” says Hughes. “From architects to project managers, all the team members have the information for constant information flow. And the team leader or manager at the Center of Expertise has a complete understanding of the project as well.”

Fast Facts
Number of developers	5
Estimated months to complete	4
Developer tools	Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Software Development Kit
Programming language	Microsoft Visual C#®
Programming model and technologies	Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

When a build is complete, it can be tested overnight by a development team at a different Center of Expertise, and the first team can resume work on code changes the next morning to reduce cycle time and increase collaborative work.

“Developer productivity increases when you’re using the latest tools, such as Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server,” Hughes comments. “It’s our belief that this environment is much more productive than a Java environment.”

Minimizes Risk, Reduces Errors
By implementing three regional Team Foundation Servers and one central Team Foundation Server instead of using a centralized-server model, EDS clearly retains a lower risk of downtime and other related issues.

In addition, development teams at the Centers of Expertise eliminate the consequences of possible, unforeseen errors through features such as work item tracking and check-in policies. EDS knows that the company is less likely to experience time and cost issues associated with manual work or errors.

“By reducing risk with the new distributed model, EDS also increases disaster-recovery ease,” says Hughes. “EDS’s future .NET development will be supported by Team Foundation Server.”

Partnership Benefits
“Without Microsoft, it would have been really difficult to complete this distributed model,” says Kowall. “The key to our success on this project was the combination of the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server tools along with the support of Microsoft architects.”

The close working relationship between EDS and Microsoft also provides Microsoft with the knowledge it needs to build even more functionality into its next set of Visual Studio products.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows®-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2005 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. With Visual Studio 2005, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.

For more information about Visual Studio 2005, go to:
www.microsoft.com/vstudio

 

For More Information
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For more information about EDS products and services, call (972) 604 - 6000 or visit the Web site at:
www.eds.com

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