Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio® 2010

Chapter 22. Introduction to Project Management

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Exploring project management capabilities in Team Foundation Server

• Learning about Team Project

• Learning how to use work items to plan your project

• Understanding work items and how you can track work

• Learning how to use Microsoft Project and Microsoft Excel to manage work items in Team Foundation Server

Software development is a team sport. The players in a software development team include developers, testers, business analysts, project managers, and more.

In American football, a quarterback is leader of the team on the field and has multiple tasks at hand — the most obvious being the handling of the football. A quarterback should be able to communicate clearly to his teammates the plan for the next play, call an audible depending on the opposing team's defensive formations, change routes on-the-fly if his assigned receivers are double-teamed by the opposition, and manage the game clock effectively and efficiently. This is just a sample list of a quarterback's responsibilities.

You could infer that there are similarities between the responsibilities of a quarterback and the role of a project manager in a software development team. There are clear parallels in that a project manager should communicate the task at hand clearly to the team, be able to change the project plan based on changes caused by requirement changes or resource issues, be able to reassign tasks if a particular team member is blocked, and manage the ...