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December 2009 - Posts - ALM as a way of life

December 2009 - Posts

Fresh on E4D web site - Team System 2010 courses

Last week, Eyal has published our new Team System 2010 courses. A lot of people contacted us with questions and requests and we are doing our best to provide the best solutions quieckly.

Some of you asked us to translate the list to English. We now have a the list of English, here and here:

Team System 2010 Ultimate- The complete knowledge base

The Team System 2010 platform is an ultimate solution for software professionals. In this course we will present the specific parts of the platform and discuss industrial and methodological best practices of combining them together to produce a complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution. We will learn how to effectively apply the platform's tools and features for the best benefit of the role holders in the software production process: the architect, the developer, the team leader, the tester, the project manager, the R&D and QA managers and even the CEO.

For the course curriculum press here

VSTS 2010 - Managing Agile and Scrum software projects

A growing number of software organizations are choosing agile methodologies as the fundamentals of their development process. Team System is a complete working environment for agile software projects: managing the requirements backlog, planning or iterations and sprints, poker planning, impediments, task board managements, burndown reports and more. During the course we will present an abundance of agile templates. We will learn how to use them to support the various needs of our software projects: code and version handling, time and resources, QA and more.

For the course curriculum press here

Visual Studio Team System for Architect 2010

The 2010 version of the Visual Studio Team System contains a vast set of advanced features for the software architect. The toolset include unique architecture aids and features for affective and flexible design and planning. They also combine persistent link between the architecture artifacts and Team Foundation Server artifacts like work items and the Build mechanism.

For the course curriculum press here

 

Team System 2010 Extensibility

The Team System 2010 platform supplies the .NET developers with a wealth of methods for broadening and extending the built-in capabilities of the product. The flexibility of the API and the extensible nature of the product makes are possible, and easy, for developers to construct extensions and adjustments. During this course we will learn how to design and develop extensions to the different parts of the product. We will also discuss synchronization mechanism between Team Foundation Server and line of business applications. The graduates will be able to extend Team System to optimally fit the business needs of their organizations and customers

For the course curriculum press here

 

Visual Studio Team System 2010 - Test & Lab Solutions

The new edition to the Microsoft testing tools, known as the Test & Lab management makes it possible to easily integrate software quality throughout the entire software production process. We are now able to track each business requirement, change request workflow and visualize their connection and affect on design, development and testing and bugs. In this course we will learn how to automate and empower the testing process, manage the test cases and even build virtual test labs.

For the course curriculum press here

ALM User Group – Meeting on the 22nd

 

The group is meeting next week, on Tuesday evening to discuss and learn about the new features and capabilities of the source control and build parts of the 2010 release of Team System.

 

More details and a registration link in the group blog

 

see you there!

 

Sarit

Using TeamBuild as a Marketing tool

I'm used to think about TeamBuild as an integration point for the ALM process, packaging together source, tasks, bugs and tests into a meaningful entity.

Last week I realized that we can also use TeamBuild as a marketing tool and use it to brand software products to the maximal extent.

It all started when one of E4D customers asked us to extend the build-in Build Definition and add to it the capability to control the assembly info for the all DLL files.

The task was not very complex in the technical aspect and we found useful hints in fantastic work of Etienne Tremblay and Gautam Goenka which we combined to create our own custom task.

The result is that we now have a simple solution which tightens the connection  between the dev and marketing departments.

Let's look at the DLL classic version format: Major.Minor.Iteration.Build

Major and Minor are the marketing versions of the product that we communicate to our customers.

Iteration – the internal dev cycle

Build – and incremental value.

Before writing the solution, we needed to manually change the first 3 values for each project, now we have a simple interface which helps the non-technical marketing folks participate and simply tag the product to match the product version that the market know.

Now, we have the same value everywhere: in the product 'help about', in the setup, in the marketing brochures and at the most important place: at the DLL level.