Those three words are music to the ears of any team that has worked with Sitecore,
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, and a Source Code Control System. Each developer
can now identify changes, iterate their portion of the project, and get their contributions back into the workflow quickly and without worrying about collisions. Because let's face it, no developer wants to think that there is a chance his or her code will be clobbered and no developer wants to be guilty of clobbering another person's code.
Now each developer can work with a local database knowing their changes will make
it into the next deployment build with no need to invest incredible amounts of time
in all of the checking and rechecking that packaging requires.
Deployment environments are built from a single Source Code Control System, and
Team Development for Sitecore makes sure changes don't step on each other so team
solutions can be deployed from development to quality assurance, all the way to
production. Changes are easily merged, with no packaging!!!
You want to provide the most flexible and welcoming environment possible for your
highly talented developers. They can now have the workbench of their dreams wherever
they want it to be, freed from worry that being disconnected from the main database
will slow them down in any way. They can now work remotely, then when they reconnect
to the network they can sync and merge all of their changes to the Source Code Control System without having to first check and re-check everything before packaging their
changes for incorporation.
When developing Sitecore it's extremely hard to development without experiencing dependency issues and as we all know no code exists in a vacuum. Many teams, attempting to overcome this obstacle, have tried assigning different developers to work on different parts of projects. These techniques were met with only moderate success.
With Team Development for Sitecore you can stop worrying about dependencies and
allow your developers to work with complete freedom, focusing on what they need
to accomplish rather than worrying about how well it will play with changes others
may be making.
Now you'll have every member of your team working at full capacity, in minutes. No more lost
time spent checking, verifying, and packaging changes for submission. No more time-consuming
testing and re-testing with every build. You'll have new releases out the door in
record time as your team enjoys continuous builds and fully automated deployment
with Team Development for Sitecore.
Add new developers to a project as needed. Team Development for Sitecore makes it
easy for you to create a complete new workspace for a new member joining the team.
Bring them fully up to speed in record time with source control and commentary
on every change that has already taken place. No more waiting for new developers
to "figure everything out". With Team Development for Sitecore they simply review
the check-in history of Sitecore items and .NET code and get right to work.
Having everything in a Source Code Control System gives you one master repository for your project. The Source Code Control System becomes the master and central integration point of all the code and Sitecore items for a team. Even if you are a team of 1, using a Source Code Control system is the smart way to work.
TDS allows Sitecore items and .NET code to be maintained in your Source Code Control System, this alone gives you plenty of advantages including:
- Complete accountability and audit trail for all changes to all Sitecore items and .NET code in a project.
- Store all of your Sitecore items and code in a single repository, allowing for easy backups.
- Work remotely or disconnected from the network and then sync and merge changes at a later date.
- Easily compare versions of items and code.
- Rollback to prior versions if a problem is discovered.
- Leverage advance source code management techniques such as branching.
Of course the end of packaging is not the only major benefit of Team Development
for Sitecore.
All Sitecore items and all code are stored in a single repository which makes backups
simple. No more worrying about whether or not everything is backed up. Just back
up the repository!
Team Development for Sitecore also makes it easy to compare different versions of
each of your items and code. If something you've done turns out to be an error you
can simply roll back to a previous version!
Nothing builds client enthusiasm like seeing their project truly "come to life"
before their eyes. Team Development for Sitecore provides visual graphing of the
various Sitecore templates, relationships, and other components which can easily
be viewed and reviewed by your designers and developers along with project managers
and clients so they can witness as their project comes to life in real time. Any
changes or new additions they may require can then quickly be integrated back into
the workflow becoming part of the overall solution.
The ability to managing the release of a Sitecore project using proven best practices
for application development.
- Develop locally.
- Continuous integration to QA and staging environments.
- Convenient MSI install for clients.
Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services delivers some of the most highly regarded
and highly productive development tools available. Team Development for Sitecore
not only expands upon these tightly integrated, extensible lifecycle tools, it also
facilitates the incorporation of Visual Studio Team Services or Subversion with
Sitecore delivering an unparalleled development environment for you and your team.
- Full integration with Visual Studio Team System work item tracking and reporting.
- Project managers and testers can easily track and assign work items
- Testers can report bugs that are assigned to the developers via workflow