Overview of Visual Studio Team System Customization

Visual Studio Team System provides you with abundant features, and one of its most important capabilities is adapting to the changing needs of an organization or project. But wait a second-we’ve spent the entire book discussing how Visual Studio Team System can be used to enhance your team’s ability to deliver software. Why would you need to customize Visual Studio Team System when it is capable of doing so much right out of the box?

In the world of technology and the software that drives it, the only constant is change, and every process we use and every tool that helps us do our job must embrace this fact. Change is inevitable and must be addressed to incorporate varying types of projects, ever-changing team dynamics, the integration of lessons learned, and unique market conditions that force us to continually innovate technologically on an ever-decreasing budget. The tools that we use to manage our teams must be as adaptable as the software industry they support if we expect them to provide us with any ongoing value. Throughout this book, we have established how Visual Studio Team System can be used to provide support for the software development life cycle; in this chapter, we will take a look at how you can extend this value by customizing various aspects of Visual Studio Team System to reflect your specific needs.

I’m sure you’re wondering why customization of Visual Studio Team System is covered in a book about managing projects. Simply stated, it is extremely important that project managers understand how to extract the most value out of the Visual Studio Team System for their teams.