Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 is an integrated Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) solution comprising tools, processes, and guidance to help everyone on the team improve their skills and work more effectively together. Visual Studio Team System enables members of your team to:

• Collaborate and communicate more effectively with other team members and business stakeholders.
• Ensure software quality using advanced quality tools at every step of the application life cycle.
• Gain visibility into project activity and priorities to make informed decisions based on real-time data.

Visual Studio Team System is broken into two parts: Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Role Editions.

Team Foundation Server

Team Foundation Server (TFS) is an integrated collaboration server to help you drive your development process from requirements through to deployment.  It allows you to store all project artefacts in one location and access that information and data from a tool of your choice. Visual Studio, Outlook, Microsoft Project, Excel, Eclipse, Web Access, SharePoint etc)

• Source Code Repository
  • TFS is an enterprise quality Version Control for all source code. It's an artifact storage unit so it's not just for .Net code.
• Project Portal
  • TFS provides a Windows SharePoint Services Portal for every project to give one central location for project documentation.
• Work Item Tracking
  • Work Items give visibility of all work outstanding in your project (i.e. use cases, tasks, test cases, and bugs).
• Project Reporting
  • SQL Server Reporting Services make it simple to produce high quality reports to provide better project transparency.
• Project Management
  • TFS offers a data warehouse of project-related metrics, ranging from defect trends, test results, and quality indicators to work complete, progress reports, and unplanned work reports.
• Automated Build Server
  • TFS offers a tightly integrated and highly configurable build component based on MSBuild.
• Development Process
  • TFS is process agnostic, and can be configured to support any process with a Process Template.

Visual Studio Team System Role Editions

• Development + Database
  • Developer Edition is focused on code quality and provides a set of tools to identify inefficient, insecure, or poor-quality code.
  • Database Edition provides advanced tools for database change management and testing.
• Testing
  • Tester edition provides a comprehensive suite of testing tools for Web applications and services that are integrated into the Visual Studio environment.
• Architecture
  • Architect edition focuses on improving the design and validation of distributed systems.

All the Visual Studio Team System Role Editions are built on top of Visual Studio Professional Edition, so the team editions inherit from VS Pro but include many extra features

Visual Studio Team System 2010

• Business Alignment - Business Alignment centers on ensuring you are building the right thing for the business need and that it is going to be successful when completed.
• Testing & Application Quality - Testing and Application Quality centers on making sure applications you build are high quality, developers to design and build quality applications from the beginning, QA organization can verify the quality before deployment and analysts and project managers can ensure that what is being done meets their requirements.
Features
• Test planning tools to breakdown requirements, plan tests and test configurations and assign testing responsibilities.
• A TFS based test case management system that enables you to track all of your test cases, relate them to requirements and plans, track progress and perform impact analysis.
• Test prioritization that highlights the tests that need to be run based on the changes that have actually been made to an application.
• A tool for manual testers to help them manage their test runs, automate them to reduce manual labour and report actionable bugs that the developer is sure to be able to reproduce and fix.
• Tools for developers to see exactly what testers have done when finding a bug, including the ability to "debug" the code as it was running at the time they hit the bug.
• A new "gated checkin" feature which provides a natural evolution of continuous integration to catch build breaks before they happen rather than after.
• And much more...

For more information check out Brian Harry's