Managing SharePoint projects through TEAM FOUNDATION SERVER April 25, 2018 Published by Panni

We have developed and delivered several SharePoint application projects to a client of ours who is operating in the oil and gas services business. Some of the applications, which we have developed include the following:

AP automation

Systems integration

SharePoint Services for Business Intelligence, Workflow automations and Document management

As our Sharepoint application stack grew for this client, we faced the following issues:

Tracking of bugs and tasks needed additional effort for the managers There was no clear traceability between issues logged and code update. Artifacts and documents were not up-to date Proper guidelines were not followed for methodologies and they were not standardized Monitoring the performance of resources was an overhead No synchronization within the Projects, task items, bugs and code changes Difficult to determine root cause of project success or failure Moving code from test to live systems caused several regression failures

To address these problems we did a detailed gap analysis and came up with the implementation of Team Foundation Server. TFS is a Microsoft product which provides Source code management, Project management and Issue portal management for the entire Application Lifecycle.

TFS is a central repository where the source codes of s/w applications, requirement documents and work items (like Project, Task, issues and Change Request etc.) can be stored in and maintained. Some of the interesting features are:

Changes in source code can be linked to an issue for future reference. This is basically linking a change-set number to the issue number (explained in detail in upcoming blogs) The projects can be linked to the change requests. So it helps in synchronizing the timelines of projects with the number of change requests Reports can be generated for issue statuses to know the bug trends and burndown charts to estimate the deadline of a project.

In my next post i will talk about source code management using TFS server.