Latest VSTS Thoughts
It seems that the more I play with VSTS, and learn cool new things, the less likely I am to blog about it. I find myself talking to people about Team System almost every day, but constantly don't think to record some of the more interesting bits here. So--- If you haven't looked at the full feature-set yet, you need to check out work item tracking (WIT). WIT is my favorite piece of VSTS, it allows you to manage and track your work, your bugs, risks, etc.
However, I'm extremely disappointed with the MS Project synchronization, I'm curious to see how that evolves prior to release. The problem is this: I think a developer should access their work items within VS, and know exactly what they should be working on. As they complete a portion of a task, they should be able to (from VS) mark it partially complete. The PM would then sync that data and update the project plan with % complete.
Neither of these scenarios are supported today (Dec. CTP). If a developer has 10 work items, there is no "start date" on them to indicate an order. Within a project plan, the PM usually sets that up, but there is no field to hold that in the work item itself. One of the guys that I work with is going to be exploring soon how hard it would be to add the additional field to the work items, and then modify the field mapping to Project. That way, if MS doesn't fix this, we'll have a solution. The same would need to be done for % complete data - though I think that may be there in beta 2.
Another annoyance is that people "assigned to" a work item, don't map to the "resource" within a Project task. This requires you to manally synchronize these important data items. I'm not sure what the product team is thinking on this, and I've already passed along my feedback. Of course, if MS doesn't correct these issues, and I can get them working on my own, that just means there is some opportunity :-).