What Does Visual Studio Team System Mean?
Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed as a software product by Microsoft Corp. to facilitate software project creation, development and management. VSTS is composed of four subproducts:
- Visual Studio, a development environment
- Visual Studio Test Professional for test data management and test case execution
- Team Foundation Server, which offers collaboration of source code files and centralized database
- Visual Studio Lab Management, which provides features to create a virtual environment for software testers
Techopedia Explains Visual Studio Team System
A software development task often consists of several stages and procedures with different people involved in each stage:
- The business analyst responsible for analyzing the given problem and representing it visually
- The project manager who allocates budget and resources and frames a schedule for the project development activities
- The software architect who studies the system and its functions in depth and develops necessary algorithms
- The developer who writes code based on the algorithms
- The software test engineer who tests the code to fix bugs and defects
- The deployment team responsible for delivering the fully operational product to the client
Each of the members needs a different tool to work with. For example, the project manager is only interested in working with tools that provide an insight regarding the budget of the project and is not interested in tools associated with testing. Therefore, a software package is needed that can meet the demands of the people involved in software development. VSTS offers a software package with several sub-packages that incorporate all essential features.
The entire functionality of VSTS relies on the core component known as the Team Foundation Server (TFS). It facilitates development collaboration among different teams of people working on the same software project, offers a repository for storing configuration objects, and enables data collection and project tracking. It is the main back-end component of VSTS.
