Visual Studio Roadmap

Modern application management solutions need to address the underlying issues that prevent teams from reaching their full potential. They must facilitate:

• Collaboration through integration across all roles in the team
• Timely and actionable feedback to reduce wasted effort
• Leveraging natural and appropriate tools for the task at hand
• Transparent and agile best practices to be adopted at will

Software should be viewed as a living asset, with the Application Lifecycle representing a continuum across the connected activities of a products lifetime, spanning: the identification of business needs, software construction, release management and monitoring, support and maintenance, through to the eventual retirement of the solution. Two flows are critical across the lifecycle, which span multiple teams, roles and individuals:

• Concept to working systems – shortening time to value, and
• Discovery of an issue to resolution – lowering mean time to resolution

An Application Lifecycle Management toolset must support these flows and accelerate the transitions between the development team and the operations team. As new requirements are established, applications evolve. There is a tight connection between the development and operations team, so whenever hand-offs exist there is a potential for bottlenecks to occur.

Figure 1: Establishing a flow between development and operations

Explore Diagram as a SpeakFlow™ Presentation

For over five years we have been on a journey to create an offering that addresses these issues and resolves the major sources of waste in the development lifecycle.

Laying the Foundation - Visual Studio 2005 & 2008

When Visual Studio Team System launched in 2005, the focus was on delivering transparency by creating a single data store that housed a transparent backlog of work for the entire team. The result was Team Foundation Server, which integrated with a customizable development process so you could set up the system in multiple configurations to adapt the system to your specific needs. Integration between the development environment and the data store created a transparent process where developers could go about their day-to-day work and, with minimal effort, ensure that the project plan was up-to-date.

Reducing Waste in Construction - Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 focuses on further enhancing the flow of information across the team and improving software quality. We connected the quality assurance process with the development team and made understanding existing systems and designing systems deeply connected parts of the development lifecycle. In addition, we brought the benefits of our vision to developers on other platforms with first-party support for the Eclipse development environment on Macintosh, Windows and Linux. This helped teams working on a broad portfolio of composite and heterogeneous applications to share the benefits of a shared team collaboration infrastructure.

Extending Coverage and Embracing New Roles - Visual Studio vNext

Visual Studio vNext is another major step forward as we extend our coverage of the lifecycle and embrace additional roles critical to a projects success. We are continuing down the path of bringing the team together by creating trustworthy and transparent bridges that improve the flow of information across the entire team, eliminating the most common causes of waste. We are also focusing on ensuring the team receives continuous feedback throughout the lifecycle to encourage rich, productive and scalable interactions, which increase the productivity of the team and reduce risk. In addition, we are maintaining our focus on driving better software quality in every cycle of development, from check-in to sprint. We free the team from distractions and keep them ‘in the zone’ by automating many of the common interactions and bookkeeping activities.

Figure 2: Bringing the team together