Chapter 10: Wrapping It Up: The Endgame and Deployment

Chapter 10

Wrapping It Up: The Endgame and Deployment

Endgame. Just like in the game of chess, this small but key segment can make or break you, and it must be played carefully. In the application-development-process endgame, players are the operations team that will deploy and maintain the completed system. Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team System will define these engineers' areas of responsibility through the assignment of tasks, the deployment of reports and checklists, the creation of setup files, and the continued tracking and reporting of defects. This chapter, which addresses the culmination of the software construction project, will round out the remaining features of Team System.

Testing often occurs after development, most often in the traditional waterfall development model. There have been many studies on software development efficiencies and they all have the same message: As the project progresses, the cost of fixing bugs becomes much more costly. Not only is finding and fixing bugs that evade daily development practices expensive, but it's also difficult to keep test and development environments in sync and diagnose run-time errors. Throughout this book, we looked at how Team System assists in helping different members of the project team solve these and other challenges, thus increasing the predictability of project success.