Azure DevOps Server: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:36, 10 August 2007

Revision as of 21:51, 10 August 2007

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Most activity in Team Foundation Server revolves around a "work item". Work items are a single unit of work which needs to be completed. In many respects they are similar to a "bug" item in [[bug tracking system]]s such as [[Bugzilla]], in that a work item has fields to define Area, Iteration, Assignee, Reported By, a history, file attachments, and any number of other attributes. Work items themselves can be of several different types, such as a ''Bug'', a ''Task'', a ''Quality of Service Assessment'', a ''Scenario'', and so forth. The framework chosen for any given project in a Team Foundation Server defines what types of work items are available and what attributes each type of work item contains. These items are internally stored in [[XML]] format, and their schema can be customized to add other attributes to different items, or create new items on a per-project basis. Each work item has an associated control policies which control who is allowed to access and/or change the items. It also includes notification and logging capabilities to log all the creation, access or change events (controlled by policies) and optionally notify certain users when certain events occur.

Any given Team Foundation Server contains one or more ''Team Projects'', which consists of Visual Studio solutions, configuration files for Team Build and Team Load Test Agents, and a single Sharepoint repository containing the pertinent documents for the project. A team project contains the user defined work items, source branches, and reports that are to be managed by TFS. TFS provides capabilities for managing these projects.When creating a project, a software development framework must be chosen, and cannot be changed afterwards. TFS includes several templates for the most common ones, including agile and formal methodologies. Choosing the framework populates the project with predefined items such as project roles and permissions, as well as other documents like project roadmap, document templates, and report definitions. These items can be then linked to work items as well. The status of certain elements of the project can be set to be automatically updates as work items are updated. TFS can integrate with [[Microsoft Office Excel|Microsoft Excel]] for the creation and tracking of peojectproject items. The status of the items can be created and edited in Excel and the resulting spreadsheet document can be submitted to TFS, which will import the data into its project management feature. It can also integrate with [[Microsoft Project]] as the project management front end. The project items can also be exported as Excel documents for further analysis of the data.

TFS does not natively include any UI for performing these tasks, rather the capabilities are exposed via [[web service]]s, which are then used by client applications like [[Visual Studio Team System]] [[Integrated Development Environment|IDE]]. However, TFS does include a ''Team Foundation Client'' (TFC) application which can be used to perform these tasks outside of the VSTS IDE. TFC also operates by invoking the same web services. TFS exposes a client API that can be used by client applications to access the functionality; the API itself manages proxies to communicate with the web services as well as client side caching to reduce latency. The [[WSDL]] descriptions of the web services are also provided, in case an application wants to directly call the web services.