The Skinny On Team Server
But as the software giant prepares to release Visual Studio 2005 in November and Team Foundation Server early next year, solution providers must weigh the challengesin the form of added complexity, costs and trainingthat will come as a result of embracing the new development paradigm.
The potential benefits are equally significant.
"What causes problems today is the disconnect between what business wants and what they actually get," said Joe Homnick, president of Homnick Systems, a Microsoft Certified Technical Education Center partner in Boca Raton, Fla. "Team System marries business and IT through the modeling process [and] bridges the gap between IT and developers."
Team development is hardly a new concept. For decades, developers within corporate walls and distributed across the globe have used source code registries for version control, to track changes and to give check-in and check-out rights to multiple developers.
What is new for Microsoft and other tool developers: offering specific tools for different types of workers, along with technology enabling realtime, or near-realtime, collaboration. In the case of Visual Studio 2005, that collaboration technology comes by way of Microsoft's Team Foundation Server, itself based on Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration platform and SQL Server 2005. But roles-based tools and collaboration aren't the only technologies helping to bridge nonprogrammers and developers. There is also the model-driven approachagain, found in Visual Studio and other unified modeling language toolsetswhich produces better consistency and quality.
"There's always been a chasm between developers and IT professionals and business analysts, so we're unifying tools for different roles in the traditional application development world," said Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism Group.
Microsoft is not alone in offering such tools. Rational pioneered the roles-based development approach, and earlier this year, parent company IBM launched its Atlantis project to unify the roles-based Rational and IBM WebSphere tools in one team product line with an underlying communications platform. In September, Borland launched JBuilder 2006, an upgrade whose core new feature is peer-to-peer collaboration to enable virtual peer programming. The Eclipse Foundation also is sponsoring a collaboration framework.
With Microsoft's Team System, integrators can codify process methodologies, thereby enforcing development policy adherence among all members of a development team.
That in itself can be a huge benefit. "InterKnowlogy believes in Visual Studio Team System so strongly that we are melding our methodology and process around it, without question," said Tim Huckaby, CEO of InterKnowlogy, a custom application development company based in Carlsbad, Calif.
Still, there are significant hurdles associated with Team System. For one, users must pay for client access licenses to use the Team Foundation Server, Microsoft's first Visual Studio Server. According to pricing released by Microsoft, customers will pay roughly $25,000 for a typical implementation of the roles-based versions, collaboration server and unlimited number of users.
"Team features are expensive, and licensing [for Visual Studio] is complex, given they have changed the licensing model," said Bob Tedesco, CTO of Resolute, a Microsoft partner in Bellevue, Wash. What's more, he said, smaller partners and customers may find the roles-based version too cumbersome. "You can't always make a delineation in the features you need between software architect, developer or analyst," said Tedesco. "In many cases, a developer acts as an architect, and so the model only works for huge organizations where people have well-defined jobs. This is a heavyweight product. When people move from project management by spreadsheets to something better, there is often a gap where something simpler is needed."
Training is another potential hurdle, as Team System entails not only new technology but new ways of working. That's one reason Microsoft's Certified Technical Education Center will offer team-based training. Microsoft also is exploring a group certification that would ensure an entire team's proficiency on Team System.
"We do see a big trend toward vendors focusing on role-based and team-based solutions and we see this as a great opportunity to teach across the entire team rather than just teaching the developer," said Janine Rood, vice president of marketing for DevelopMentor, Torrance, Calif. "Sharing a common process across the entire teamincluding designer, architect, developer, tester and managershould greatly enhance an organization's effectiveness."
Visual Studio 2005 Team Editions and suite will be available Nov. 7. Team Foundation Server, which enables collaboration, is scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 2006.