Visual Studio Team System 2010 focuses on application quality
Microsoft is making significant strides into ALM with the upcoming Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 that it says will better enable developers and QA professionals to collaborate and focus on application quality.The company has not committed to a release date for VSTS 2010. Dave Mendlen, director of developer tools at Microsoft, noted that it would be part of the next wave of the .NET Framework, .NET 4.0. Microsoft will also ship a standard edition of Visual Studio 2010 concurrently.
VSTS 2010, formerly known by the code name “Rosario,” expands the company’s ALM vision with more roles and fewer walls between them, effectively “democratizing” ALM, said Mendlen. Modeling plays a heavy role in how that is accomplished.
Microsoft is working on a multi-product modeling initiative called “Oslo,” which is intended to drive model-driven development into the mainstream of application development. In that effort, the company is creating a low-level XML-based modeling language that can be extended to support domain-specific languages, as well as BPEL and UML.
That modeling technology will be integrated with Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) in VSTS 2010, said Cameron Skinner, product unit manager for VSTS. More specifically, he explained that the model would offer multiple views and map physical architecture to assets.
Setting up architecture was a “high priest” activity for customers, said Mendlen. But VSTS’ architect component, called Architecture Explorer, will simplify the process through modeling and added workflow to help individual team members participating in an agile process to track and trace work items via TFS.
He added that TFS would enforce constraint-based modeling with “continuous integration” where code is validated against architecture as it is being checked in.
“If a build invalidates architectural policy, it will be flagged,” said Skinner, noting that customers have told Microsoft that there is often a disconnect between what developers believe the architecture is and what it actually is.
VSTS 2010 is a “big move back toward an endorsement of modeling for Microsoft, but in the greater scheme of model-driven development [it's] less huge,” said Gartner research vice president Jim Duggan. He added that VSTS allows customers to “stay on Microsoft ground,” whereas, they previously have had to go to tools from companies such as Borland or IBM to handle UML modeling.
Aside from modeling, Architecture Explorer will deliver new source control facilities, including branch visualization, which will help developers contemplate “complicated, deep branches” and merge them back together, said Mendlen. This feature is designed to help customers maintain multiple releases of software in parallel.
Branch visualization brings Microsoft up to speed with competing products, including IBM Rational ClearCase, said Chris Menegay, a principal consultant for Notion Solutions and a Microsoft regional director, a title given to volunteers recognized by Microsoft for technical expertise. “We’ve helped customers move off of ClearCase, and the one thing that they always end up missing is the branch/version visualization.”
Microsoft has done some merging of its own: Its database professional role and team developer role products, VSTS 2008 Development Edition and VSTS 2008 Database Edition, have been pulled together into a unified product. “These were separate products and roles, but it is clear to us that the [database developer] is more of a hybrid developer,” Mendlen explained.
Quality, not quantity
Microsoft also wants to pull quality into the process earlier, said Mendlen. He observed that handoffs of applications between developers and QA professionals were inefficient, “siloed functions” and not nearly collaborative enough to effectively infuse quality into software in a timely manner.
One of the biggest bottlenecks in the process is that QA people are often unable to reproduce bugs, he said. Microsoft is attempting to change that dynamic with new testing tools that record the state of the running application, all of the appropriate logs, and the debugging of that application through a suite of agents and collectors, explained Skinner.
It is like “TiVo for testers,” Mendlen said, explaining that VSTS 2010 will package screen grabs and video recording and playback for testers to dig into as a work item. He noted that it will also save testers time as they will no longer have to reinstall the build themselves. The same capability is already offered by several Microsoft partners in their tools.
After a tester proves that a bug exists, he or she can hand it off back to the developer to dig into the “nasty details,” Mendlen said. “This is a key scenario,” he noted, “Many times the developer would already have moved on to version 2.0. Instead of shelving their work, they can now dig into [the bug report] and move in.”
Check-in requirements, like unit tests being run or test scripts being created, will help deal with the problem of developers not running necessary tests, Forrester senior analyst Jeffrey Hammond wrote in an e-mail.
Developers that want to test heterogeneous composite applications are out of luck: VSTS 2010 only provides visibility into .NET applications. Customers will be required to purchase additional tooling from Microsoft partners to test Java applications.
“Doesn’t everyone define heterogeneous as all versions of Windows?” quipped Gartner’s Duggan. “This is a weakness in a number of places in their story. [Microsoft] are hoping that TeamPrise [a third-party product] will be good enough for clients, but it is a tilt that hurts them in general shops.”
Microsoft is also hoping to push testing back earlier into the software development life cycle with a new impact analysis feature that interrogates source code and assigns test suites to code before it is checked in. It is a timesaving mechanism that runs the tests that absolutely need to be run, explained Skinner.
It is not being designated a best practice, however, and is intended more for time-crunched developers. “If you can run all of [the] tests, do it,” said Mendlen. “More focused, quicker testing means catching more bugs.”
In another bid to increase testing efficiency, VSTS 2010 will include test-planning tools that capture manual tests, Mendlen said, noting that most testing is performed manually.
Microsoft has nothing to announce regarding the integration of its Security Development Lifecycle, said Mendlen when asked about whether security vulnerabilities would be treated as defects in VSTS 2010. Microsoft recently introduced a threat-modeling tool that integrates with Visual Studio.
As a special incentive, Software Assurance customers that currently own either VSTS 2008 Development Edition or VSTS 2008 Database Edition will receive the other product for free.
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