TFS Software Factory

Overview

TFS Software Factory has been designed with the goal of improving control and productivity for major software factories using Team Foundation Server 2008 and 2010.

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Features

• Define and validate coding standards and design guidelines.
• Manage and maintain multiple projects and versions.
• Business process modeling.
• Define an approval workflow for stage promotion.
• Automatic deploy of different project versions, including web applications and server farms.
• Email notifications.
• Promotion approval workflow.
• Automatic branching, merging and labeling.

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Benefits

• Keep your software factory projects under control.
• Help management to track software assets and versions.
• Reduce errors and improve standards compliance.
• Improved productivity and efficiency at organization level.
• Better communication between your IT departments.

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Custom source analysis rules for enforcing your software factory standards

These rules can be run from the tool FxCop tool or within Visual Studio. There are also integrated as part of a check-in policy in Team Foundation Server, so code can be checked-in to the repository only if it complies with the rules.

This rules ranged from notation and styling standards, to data base access and security of applications.

Examples of such rules are:

• Every namespace defined must begin with MySoftwareFactory.
• Any method longer than 15 lines should use the Tracer class.
• Custom exceptions should derive from MySoftwareFactoryException.

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Manage and control

Our tool contributes to an efficient control of: projects, versions, fixes, servers, environments, stage promotions and deployments. Web access interface to easily access all the information and perform day to day operations.

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Automation

Extensive use of Team Foundation Server for automatically creating the project’s branches, assigning the appropriate permissions, queuing builds, merging and labeling source code, etc.

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Business processes modeling

We use WF to tailor our tool your development process and approval workflow.

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Out of the box lifecycle stages

To tackle the complexity of the lifecycle of the projects, several of the company’s processes were modeled, including:

1. Project and version creation.
2. Stage promotion.
3. Custom exceptions should derive from MySoftwareFactoryException.
4. Rollback.

A typical flow would involve the revision and approval of several of the bank’s areas, notification to the interested parties, and strong interaction with TFS.

Workflow Foundation is being used, providing a higher level of abstraction and visual representation of the business processes. This makes easy to create and understand the processes, at the same time it permits changing the flow and rules associated with them.

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Out of the box lifecycle stages

• Team Foundation Server.
• Workflow Foundation.
• Windows Communication Foundation.
• Web Deployment Tool.
• Entity Framework.
• FxCop.

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