VSTS stands for Visual Studio Team services and is also known as Visual Studio Online (VSO). It's a single collaboration platform to manage all the aspects of your project, including planning, execution/delivery, and support.  

The top two benefits of leveraging VSTS with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition and LCS are as follows:

• Application Lifecycle Management (ALM): Management of business processes and requirements in LCS, using the same for delivery in VSTS
• Continuous delivery: Seamless code and data movement across environments/projects

To connect and manage your BPM library artifacts in VSTS, the LCS project must be linked to VSTS. If your project team has already deployed a DEV/build environment using the LCS project, your LCS project is most probably already linked to VSTS. You can utilize VSTS capabilities to manage all configurations, data, business, integrations, reporting, or any other requirement in your Dynamics 365 implementation.

Let's now learn the steps involved in setting up your LCS project and VSTS as per following:

1. Log in to https://www.visualstudio.com/ and create a new VSTS account, as follows:

2. Create a new VSTS project to be hosted in that account:

3. Verify whether the new project is created in VSTS:

4. Link LCS project with VSTS: The LCS project needs to be connected to the VSTS account and project from the project settings. Go to the section for VSTS and click on the Setup Visual Studio Team Services button to set up the LCS and VSTS project link:

5. In order for the LCS to access the VSTS account, it needs to be provided with a personal access token, which can be accessed from VSTS Security settings:

6. You can create a token valid for a fixed duration as per the options in VSTS, for as shown here:

7. This token should be copied and pasted in the LCS BPM - VSTS screen, along with your VSTS account URL:

8. Once you click on Continue, the LCS will be allowed to access the projects in this account, and you need to select one of the projects from VSTS:

9. After selecting the project, the work items mapping can be selected by clicking on Restore to default mappings. These work items can be changed between BPM and LCS.
10. Associate VSTS work item types with LCS items based on the process template used in the VSTS project:
11. For the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) process template, the following is a mapping of work items:

12. For Agile process template, the following is a mapping of work items:

13. Once the VSTS project process template is selected and the work item mapped, you can turn on the synchronization from LCS BPM to the VSTS project backlog.
14. Use the backlog capability to keep items in the correct order and connected to the right things and to keep items in your backlog linked to epics or scenarios you’re using to drive your business.

15. Here are some acronyms used in VSTS :
    • Epic: This is a virtual package which can span across releases and that allows you to group features.
    • Feature: This is a simple explanation of business needs.
    • Stories: This explains features in more detail, based on several constraints and conditions.

Let's now learn how to synchronize BPM with VSTS, and how it looks like on both sides in the next section.