Team Foundation Server (TFS) is a Microsoft product that provides source control, work item tracking, reporting, and project management capabilities for collaborative software development. It includes version control, build automation, integrated work item tracking for requirements, bugs, and test cases. TFS also provides reports, dashboards, and supports both Agile and waterfall methodologies through built-in and third party templates.
2. What is TFS?
Team Foundation Server (commonly
abbreviated to TFS) is a Microsoft product
offering source control, data collection,
reporting, and project tracking, and is intended
for collaborative software development projects.
[1] It is available either as stand-alone software,
or as the server side back end platform for
Visual Studio Team System (VSTS).
4. Features - Version Control
Team Foundation Server 2010 provides state of the art
version control and seamless integration with Visual
Studio. It supports teams doing parallel development and
includes many powerful features like atomic check-ins,
branching and merging, shelving, labeling, concurrent
check-outs, check-in policies, and the association of
check-ins with work items. Powerful visualization tools
reduce the complexity in branching and merging and helps
you understand the scope, organization, and maintenance
of your source code and easily identify, track, and manage
changes across branches.
5. Work Item Tracking
Team Foundation Server 2010 features an
integrated work item tracking system. Work
items can consist of requirements, tasks, bugs,
issues, and test cases. The work item tracking
system is extensible and you can define and
control fields that are presented to the user,
fields that are rolled up into reports, states that
the work item can be in, how state transitions
should occur, and receive alerts on state
changes.
7. Build Automation
eam Foundation Server 2010 provides a robust and fully
featured build automation server. You can customize
Team Foundation Build and configure triggers for manual
build, continuous integration, rolling builds, gated check-in,
or scheduled builds. The gated check-in feature helps
teams working in the same branch to prevent costly and
time-consuming build breaks by testing code in isolation
before it goes into the full repository. In addition, support
for Windows Workflow based builds with powerful features
like build queuing and build agent pooling enable you to
easily customize, manage and scale out your build
environments.
8. Reporting
Powerful reports and dashboards in Team Foundation
Server 2010 help you analyze and track progress and
quality in real-time. Project data is stored in a data
warehouse and features an OLAP cube that allows for
rich reporting using Microsoft Excel and SQL Report
Designer. Dashboards are based on Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server (MOSS)/SharePoint Server as well
as Windows SharePoint Services/SharePoint
Foundation. Team Foundation Server 2010 ships with
more than 30 reports out of the box and you can easily
create custom reports.
10. Project Management
Team Foundation Server 2010 allows you to work the way
you want and features built-in support for Agile and
waterfall methodologies. Team Foundation Server
provides MSF for Agile, CMMI and SCRUM process
templates; or you can choose from a number of third party
process templates. Use the Microsoft Excel Agile Planning
Workbook to create and manage the product backlog,
estimate the teams velocity, and break the project down
into iterations. The Iteration Backlog enables you to plan
iterations and track progress. In addition, integration with
Microsoft Project enables stakeholders and project
managers to gain real-time insight into project health as
well as ways to improve existing processes.