Why build a Software Development Lifecycle solution based on Visual Studio Team System?
Avanade has over 2500 solution developers worldwide focused on the .NET platform that work with customers to integrate Microsoft technologies in heterogeneous enterprise IT environments. As we execute large and complex projects, building mission-critical applications with geographically distributed teams, we have little room for error - the success of the project depends on how accurately we can estimate and deliver on the engagement. To this end, we are constantly looking for ways to improve consistency and repeatability of our development process and thus increase the productivity of our project teams. In other words, our project execution must be industrialized. Industrialization is about being predictable, repeatable, consistent, and high-quality.

The goals for ACA® Lifecycle can be summarized as follows:
Provide an easy to provision consistent development environment that facilitates execution of projects across a geographically distributed team.
Integrate the development methodology into the development environment.
Integrate project management tools with the development environment.
Customize the development environment and enact Avanade prescriptive guidance in the development toolset.

Visual Studio® Team System (VSTS) offers a rich environment for project execution that can be customized to meet the goals outlined above. VSTS provides integrated version control, reporting, work item tracking, process guidance, and automated build capabilities. Our approach is to use VSTS as the foundation upon which to build the Avande software development lifecycle asset. Figure 1 shows an overview of ACA® Lifecycle.

Download pdf Building the Avanade® Software Lifecycle Platform using Visual Studio 2005 Team System