Visual Studio Team System

With eager anticipation of at last being able to do "proper" development without having to scrounge empty fag (that's "cigarette", for younger or non-English readers) packets off of my smoker friends, I hereby embark on a study of VSTS by studying the (currently) free Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 e-learning courses beginning with Clinic 2551: Introduction to Visual Studio Team System.


Well, we're not off to a good start. Here is the modern take on the software development lifecycle (SDLC) according to MS:

• Envisioning (output: scope document)


• Planning (approved plan)


• Development (tested code)


• Stabilizing (approved for release)


• Deploying (productive users)

The output from "deploying" is mine. The course merely says it marks the end of the cycle.

But the big worry for me is where is design? In a "normal" development team, the majority of developers are actually coders and anyway, the output from the development stage is "tested code"; no mention of architecture or design documentation. So design isn't part of the development stage. And we certainly can't expect it to come out of the planning stage.

VS2005 includes a "Team Architect" edition, so the activity hasn't been actually lost, but to exclude it from such a high level view, with no separate output, well, MS might as well come right out and formally declare it to be "deprecated".