Where Visual Studio Comes In

Software tool vendors typically focus on a group of CMMI process areas to address with a specific product or suite of products. In the case of Visual Studio, MSF for CMMI Process Improvement is a set of diagrams, documents, project files, templates, and a WSS configuration file.

"One of our main goals with the CMMI toolkit was to make the process of generating the artifacts [documentation] necessary for an assessment to be a natural outcome of using the product," says Sam Guckenheimer, a group product manager on the Visual Studio team.

Recognizing and facilitating different roles in the software development process is a key design element of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). VSTS addresses specific roles, including architect, developer, program manager, and tester. The architect role is broken down further to include infrastructure and solution. VSTS includes unique tools for each of these roles to assist in designing the hardware necessary to support a solution and determining how the solution will be deployed.

One of the biggest hurdles in achieving CMMI compliance is living through an assessment. The SEI prescribes what your software development process should look like with the CMMI model. Then someone, an SEI-approved assessor, must look at your process and determine if it is compliant — some part of which is examining reports. Visual Studio Team System, says Microsoft, can assist in that effort.

"VSTS uses several different approaches to help an organization get to a certain level with the target goal of Level 3. First of all, we have tried to instrument the process and treat evidence gathering as a by-product of the normal development cycle. Secondly, we use reporting as the artifact generation tool and not document writing," says Guckenheimer.

Microsoft has been majoring on the collaboration theme in many areas. Windows Sharepoint Services is the key collaboration tool that comes with Windows Server 2003; it also serves as the basis for multiple functions within the VSTS environment. Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server provides the back-end services that tie the different functions together in a collaborative environment. Team Foundation Server uses SQL Server 2005, with its built-in reporting capabilities, to generate the myriad of reports available to the different roles.

Bottom Line

Using VSTS along with the MSF for CMMI process improvement is a big undertaking. You almost need to have some sort of contractual obligation as a motivator to get an entire team to adopt all of the processes and procedures required to fully implement CMMI.

The good news is that VSTS can help in that process and provide good support through the same development environment, so that generating usage reports for the auditors should be strictly business as usual.