Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (Pro-Developer)

This book is a practical guide to using the integrated tools in Visual Studio Team System to manage a team-development process. Project managers typically use a wide range of tools?such as Microsoft Office Excel®, Microsoft Office Project, and Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services. The Visual Studio Project Management Tools are integrated with the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), Office, Windows SharePoint Services, and Microsoft SQL Server? 2005 Reporting Services. This helps enable project managers to continue using the tools with which they are comfortable, yet easily share their development-oriented project data with their teams?allowing architects, developers, testers, and project managers to collaborate in a single, extensible environment. With in-depth product information and insights from early users and experienced Visual Studio Team System trainers, this guide will help you understand how to use this tightly integrated set of life-cycle development tools to help enable better planning, scheduling, collaboration, communication, reporting, and process control with development projects.

User review
Good on VSTS, lousy on process and requirements
This book provides a good overview of VSTS. It goes into enough detail that the reader understands the broad range capabilities without being overwhelmed. If you just want a reference on VSTS, then I recommend this book.

However, the book is just plain lousy when it comes to the process of managing an actual project. Firstly, PMBOK stands for `Body of Knowledge` not `Book of Knowledge`. Secondly, the importance of gathering, analyzing, validating, and verify requirements is woefully under-represented. Quality is mentioned, but in such a cursory way as to be practically useless. Ditto on CMM - not enough detail is given on key processes and work products. The process here seems focused on building software without first determining what to build or checking the correctness of what was actually build.

The approach here might work on small greenfield projects, but would be a train-wreck on any large project with involving any degree of human safety, legacy systems, accountability, etc. In other words, the project management approach in this book is probably not suitable for 90% of projects in an enterprise IT environment.

User review
Well organized and useful
This book helped me with ideas that put in practice, provided new ideas of as it manages projects with VSTS. For me it was useful.

User review
Finally, a Practical Solution for teams to create quality software,,.
In Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Joel really gets to the heart of addressing the reasons and benefits of having a common set of application lifecycle management tools (Visual Studio Team 2005 System) for all participants in the software development process to effectively track and report on individual and team progress.

It's not just the tracking and reporting, but its the metrics provided that allow answers to questions such as:` What percent complete are we at for this development project?; What's the overall software quality measurement?; How much more time is required before we are done?`

Not only does Joel discuss the problem of inter and extra-team communications for reporting on software development projects, he provides practical advice, examples and guidelines on how to implement and use Visual Studio 2005 Team System to orchestrate the communications and reporting processes for all roles (project manager, architect, developer, tester, sponsor, etc.) in the software development process.

A must read for anyone that manages Visual Studio.NET software development projects and wants to increase the effectiveness of their development efforts!