Hi All,

I am on a fairly large project (14 team members this year, probably 2-3 times that figure next year), and one of the things we have been struggling with is how to manage our requirements effectively in a large team.  After doing a lot of analysis, we have decided that the best option for all team members is to integrate our requirements into Visual Studio.  We looked at the existing toolsets out there, but haven't found anything that does exactly what we want (particularly because we're going to be in a SOA/Scrum envrionment). 

As a result, we've decided to team up with the developers and create a custom solution within Visual Studio.  We're pretty excited, as it will allow us to define business and application services as work items that the developers can then decompose into product backlog items, and in turn link those to class models and code.  We won't have to ever port information around, as everyone will have access to the repository and Reporting Services will allow us to produce formatted documents as needed on demand. 

Has anyone else looked into doing this type of work with Visual Studio before?  We are thinking this will be done via customized work item types, but if anyone has any other suggestions it would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Adrian,

While I share many of your reservations, we concluded that the loss in productivity by having to alter our work flow as well as spend time manually managing quirks of existing software made the up front costs of development worth it.  We reviewed the above white paper and also looked into suggestions made my MS employees on their blogs, but nothing quite fit.  Luckily, Visual Studio can be easily customized without code for our purposes (essentially changing XML files), which made the development costs relatively low.  The major time cost will be in developing reports to extract the information, although we don't expect this to be that much more than what it would be to develop a service-oriented set of templates.

What we are looking to do is to create a BA complement to the Scrum for Team System set of tools.  Our analysis will be service-driven with a focus at identifying composite applicaiton services that the development team and decompose into atomic services.  They can then create product backlog items that reference these services and focus on a specific set of functionality across the architecture.

Hopefully the next version of Visual Studio makes this obsolete - the early word on Rosario is that it should have similar functionality built in.  However, given that the latest verison of Visual Studio is less than 1 year old, it makes sense for our project to do this work now instead of wait and see if something comes out in the future.