Microsft's approach is broad, said Alan Stevens, and leaves room for other vendors. Stevens, a Visual Studio developer who helped co found NTeam, an open-source alternative to VSTS, said "The best of breed components was not the priority; it was the best of breed across the whole development lifecycle. For example, they don't have the best source control or bug tracking, but they were not trying to. What they are selling is the integration of the various pieces so there is no context switch." Stevens pointed out that other tools used by Visual Studio developers would require developers to switch contexts in order to communicate programming progress. That puts extra overhead on already beleaguered developers. VSTS integration, he said, "provides a kind of automatic tracking so they don't have to manually tell the tester when [something is] complete." "With Team System, I check in the code and get a list of work items. When that check item is resolved, it immediately e-mails the tester and they can begin testing," said Stevens.
Microsft's approach is broad, said Alan Stevens, and leaves room for other vendors. Stevens, a Visual Studio developer who helped co found NTeam, an open-source alternative to VSTS, said "The best of breed components was not the priority; it was the best of breed across the whole development lifecycle. For example, they don't have the best source control or bug tracking, but they were not trying to. What they are selling is the integration of the various pieces so there is no context switch."
Stevens pointed out that other tools used by Visual Studio developers would require developers to switch contexts in order to communicate programming progress. That puts extra overhead on already beleaguered developers. VSTS integration, he said, "provides a kind of automatic tracking so they don't have to manually tell the tester when [something is] complete."
"With Team System, I check in the code and get a list of work items. When that check item is resolved, it immediately e-mails the tester and they can begin testing," said Stevens.
++Alan