Professional Team Foundation Server

Chapter 17. Completing Software Projects

We have now arrived at the end of the road. Throughout this book, you learned how to create and manage a software project. At the final stage, you need to consider release management issues such as making sure your project has undergone final quality assurance (QA) and releasing and deploying your application to clients. From an operational perspective, we can look at the retirement of applications. This chapter outlines a series of strategies for wrapping up a project, analyzing your assets, and conducting a postmortem for process improvements. There are two processes you need to consider:

• A series of conventional release management steps for wrapping up a software development project

• A series of tasks you need to run through to complete a project in Team System

The build and release of a project should be considered one of the most important elements of the software development lifecycle. Think of it, the justification for the existence of a software development team is to successfully release software. If your builds are failing or you have an inadequate release process, you won't be as successful and your results will be uneven. As with other parts of the development process, you can tie release management to software engineering principles in general, and specifically to the Microsoft Solution Framework and the Microsoft Operations Framework. Let's look at how it all ties in together.