In which our hero becomes a shameless media whore:
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