Present:
The product development is done in Visual Studio at the moment using .Net technologies, so it's important to stay in the same set of tools. Roles apart from developers are using spreadsheets, docs and diagramming tools, photoshop to do their work.
Future:
We want to build a workflow (a sequential process with roles, queues for action items, passing on info from one role to the other, approval etc) for a product development. The software product will be in enhancement stage forever, more the reason to establish this flow.
Typical users are designers, business analysts, content creators, developers, code reviewers, testers.
Let's say a new webpage needs to be developed. It will be,
- thought about by the analyst in the tool, will enter the information in some format
- a designer will use drag and drop to build the page look, pass it over to the
- content creator, who will add content(help text, hyperlinks, pure text etc) to the page
- a developer will check his queue to start building logic around this page and make it functional.
I am thinking about Visual Studio Isolated shell to be used as a tool framework mainly due to it's IDE capabilities et al, to build this. Has anyone worked on a similar set of requirements? Any patterns/solutions/ideas around how to go about this in the VS Shell paradigm?
Update: Visual Studio Team System is already being used by the developers and testers, but there is no customized workflow for them (& analysts, designers etc) available in TFS. Also Visual Studio is not the place for non-dev users that want to do things like, - define navigation flow, design the page elements etc.