I am working with a small development shop that consists of a group of 5 developers and 1 QA person. We are using TFS and need to get more sophisticated on how we use this tool.

Currently the development team checks in their code each evening. A nightly build runs and pushes the output out on a network share. Our QA person uses this build for testing the next day. Sometimes the build off the trunk codebase has issues/bugs that hinder the QA process, and it hasn’t been a giant issue in the past, but we now want to get to a state where we have our QA person testing on a stable QA build.

So I believe we need to create a branch (call it QA), and the developers will continue to develop off the trunk, but the QA person will use builds created from code in the QA branch.

Seems simple enough, but we have started doing code reviews as well. So we have another desire in that only code that has been code reviewed can be promoted to the QA branch. Each developer works off a TFS item, and when they check in a changeset, they do it against a TFS item which creates a link between a checked in code file and a TFS item. Eventually the TFS item becomes complete and ready for code review. All code attached to the TFS item is reviewed. How can the versions of these files get promoted to the QA branch?

In the QA branch, if a bug is found, we want to fix it in the QA branch and have the changes migrated back to the trunk. I believe TFS has a way to automatically do this doesn’t it?

Long story short, we want to get to a build and CM environment that I believe is pretty standard, but we are unaware of how to make this happen with TFS. Given our situation above, can someone point out a book or website(s) that would address our specific needs? We would like to make this happen without having to get too deep in CM theory or TFS.

I very much appreciate any and all suggestions!

Thanks, John