Note on IT

Published: July 14, 2005

Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 provides productive, integrated, and extensible software life-cycle tools that help software development teams by improving communication and collaboration throughout the development process.

Introduction

The Visual Studio and Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) teams deployed Visual Studio 2005 Team System on the Microsoft company network for two primary purposes: to centralize source control and work item tracking for development teams within Microsoft IT, and to standardize life cycles for development projects.

Benefits

Historically, each product team within Microsoft has had individual source control, resulting in numerous development tools and bug tracking systems across the company. These systems are often a collection of custom tools and practices, which makes it difficult for Microsoft operations teams to support the company in a standardized way.

The deployment of Visual Studio 2005 Team System enables one operations team to provide the best possible service and support for Microsoft Business Unit IT development teams. In addition to the operational benefits, the Visual Studio 2005 Team System solution and development methodologies provide a way to standardize the development life cycle across the Business Unit IT teams.

In Visual Studio 2005 Team System, software build integration has created a consistent way to build projects across multiple teams; integrated source control provides a complete solution to centralize source code storage; and customized development methodologies give Microsoft IT teams the opportunity to migrate their current processes into the Visual Studio 2005 Team System variants for roles, work item types, and check-in policies. The integration of work item tracking, source control, and automated building gives teams insight into project-related reports that were never before available, showing customized views that range from code churn to bug trends to daily build reports.

Solution

A central IT team that supports application development groups within Microsoft IT deployed and hosted prerelease versions of Visual Studio 2005 Team System. The team's expertise was key when it validated the deployment and operational designs of distributed applications.

The team, which consisted of three support analysts and one program manager, deployed multiple installations of Visual Studio 2005 Team System in a Microsoft data center and adhered to the data center's strict standards for security and uptime.

The team designed the deployment to handle users from six independent teams, which range in size from 5 users on one team to approximately 400 users on the Visual Studio 2005 Team System development team. The IT-hosted service provided the entire feature set of Visual Studio 2005 Team System, including source control, work item tracking, automated builds, and office integration.

"Linking and connecting code to issues, to solution, and to test saves time in tracking and relating our development activities."

Gaylon Blank
Microsoft IT Development Lead
Microsoft Corporation

Deployment Architecture

In environments that have high numbers of users, the recommended architecture for Visual Studio 2005 Team System places the application and data tiers onto physically separated hardware. Developers access features such as source control, automated build, Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services, and work item tracking through the Visual Studio client, which interacts with the application tier.

The Visual Studio 2005 Team System feature set that the application tier hosts is accessed through Web services on port 80 (default). The remaining ports are restricted for security purposes. Additionally, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) access on port 80 is required for access to the Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft SQL Server™ Reporting Services sites. All data for work items, attachments, and source control is stored in a SQL Server 2005 database on the data tier.

The application and data tiers communicate through the standard Structured Query Language (SQL) port of 1433, and permissions and authentication are controlled through Domain Authentication by means of a combination of individual user accounts and security groups.

The current Microsoft deployment hosts SQL Server Reporting Services on the data tier, as shown in Figure 1. Future plans call for SQL Server Reporting Services to be hosted on the application tier by product release, further restricting access and isolating functionality between the two tiers.

Figure 1. Visual Studio 2005 Team System deployment architecture

"One of our objectives for Microsoft IT is to centralize source control for all groups and create a standard methodology for project lifecycles across all MSIT teams. This deployment is the first step towards reaching that goal."

Barbara Yamauchi
Senior Program Manager
MSIT VS2005 Program
Microsoft Corporation

Hardware Requirements

Because this was the first sizable deployment of Visual Studio 2005 Team System and the hardware guidelines were not completed, the deployment team used its knowledge of similar internal Microsoft project management and source control tools to determine the hardware requirements. The team considered unforeseen performance issues (which are common with beta products) and future system growth.

The following table shows the hardware that the team chose for the deployment.

Table 1. Business Group IT Hardware

Table 2 shows recently released hardware recommendations, which demonstrate that the hardware selection adheres to Beta 2 recommendations.

Table 2. Beta 2 Visual Studio 2005 Team System recommended hardware

As Table 2 shows, the maximum number of users supported for each Visual Studio 2005 Team System installation based on a multiple-tier deployment is 500. Due to the anticipated number of users, two identical installations of Visual Studio 2005 Team System were deployed. One installation supports 400 users in the Visual Studio 2005 Team System development team, and the other supports the five remaining Microsoft IT teams.

"The integration of work item tracking, source control, and team build has given teams insight into reports showing how the code base is affected with each check in."

Diana Kumar
Program Manager
Visual Studio Team
Microsoft Corporation

Performance

Over the life of the deployment, the growing number of users has not required upgrading the architecture or hardware. Figure 2 shows the growth of users with assigned work items and workspaces since August 2004.

Figure 2. User work items and workspaces

Figure 3 shows a corresponding growth in file and work item activity.

Figure 3. File and work item activity

Feature usage for members of the Visual Studio 2005 Team System development team was measured over seven days. During this period, 11,758 work items were queried, 11,454 work items were updated, and 56,337 work items were opened. Additionally, there were 22,190 source control gets, 289 check-ins, 372 shelves, 3,600,000 downloads, and 73,843 uploads.

Over the life of the deployment, the system has scaled to the numbers shown in Table 3 while maintaining the Microsoft operational standards of 99.9 percent uptime.

Table 3. Work Item and Version Control Statistics

"Team System retains all source control, work items, and anything else related to projects in the SQL Server database on the data tier. This makes the entire system backup plan very simple."

Dennis Minium
Lead Program Manager
Visual Studio Product Team
Microsoft Corporation

Redundancy and Backup

The current system supports a warm standby application tier that can be brought online in the event of a failure, whereas the data tier supports standard SQL Server 2005 redundancy options.

Visual Studio 2005 Team System stores all data pertaining to source control, work item tracking, process guidance, and program management in the SQL Server database. This practice enables Microsoft operations to back up multiple team projects simultaneously by first making full database backups to disk and then moving to tape for archival purposes.

For More Information

For more information on Visual Studio 2005 Team System, go to:

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem

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