TechEd 2011 North America TFS v.Next News (Think Dev &lt;-&gt; Stakeholder and Dev &lt;-&gt; Ops edition)

Ed Squared - Visual Studio ALM and TFS vNext Announcements at TechEd 2011

“I’m here at Microsoft TechEd 2011 North America and just wanted to fill you in on some of the news coming about in the TFS and Visual Studio ALM space for the next major release.

Stakeholder Feedback Tools

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Additional Agile Planning Tools

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New “Team Navigator” Window in Visual Studio

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Code Review Tools (Just Mentioned by Cameron)

Tools for Interacting with the Operations Team

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Rich Text in Work Items Including Screenshots & Pictures (Shown with Feedback Collection Tool)

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Jason Zander's WebLog - Announcing ALM Roadmap in Visual Studio vNext at Teched

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There are a number of scenarios that span the next version of Visual Studio for ALM. These scenarios improve the creation, maintenance and support of software solutions by focusing on improving the workflow across the entire team as well as across the entire lifecycle.

Agile Planning Tools – create transparency across the planning process and full team participation through solutions like the new backlog and task board.

Lightweight Requirements – a natural way to capture and receive feedback on requirements early in the process.

Stakeholder Feedback – working code which matches the expectations of stakeholders.

Continuous Testing – unit test coverage ensures quality in the final product.

Agile Quality Assurance – increased code quality with code review support, enhanced unit testing frameworks and new exploratory testing support.

Enhanced User Experience – more time ‘in the zone’, through improved experiences for day-to-day tasks.

Aligning Development with Operations – increased connections and insight between the operations and development teams lowering the time it takes to fix a bug in production.

Here are just a few of the screenshots from the demos today – a link to my keynote is below.

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ALM and Beyond - Visual Studio vNext Application Lifecycle Management

Today kicked off TechEd 2011 and there’s no shortage of news coming out of the conference. Most notable is what Visual Studio has to offer concerning application lifecycle management (ALM). During the keynote session, Jason Zander (corporate vice president of the Visual Studio Team in the Developer Division at Microsoft) outlined how we are continuing the investment in Visual Studio vNext ALM to enable teams to be even better integrated across the entire lifecycle to deliver competitive differentiated software with less risk, faster timelines and better visibility. As proof points, he talked about the investments in stakeholder feedback, storyboarding and improved agile planning in addition to covering updates to prior investments including test.
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Highlights

Agile Requirements (Storyboard Assistant [PowerPoint Plugin])

Agile Coding (Code Review, MyWork)

Agile Project Management (TaskBoard, Planning Boards, Project Server Integration)

Agile Quality Assurance (Exploratory Testing, Unit Testing, Code Clone Detection)

SCOM / TFS Connector CTP

Production IntelliTrace

TFS on Windows Azure

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Visual Studio vNext: Application Lifecycle Management”

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At TechEd North America, we illustrated a number of scenarios that span Visual Studio vNext and a set of associated integrations. These scenarios improve the creation, maintenance and support of software solutions by focusing on improving the workflow across the entire team as well as and across the entire lifecycle.

This whitepaper will provide additional context and outline the problems we are committed to resolving, how they relate to problems difficulties we face as an industry and how, together, we can improve the effectiveness of Application Lifecycle Management.

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Some interesting news about the future of TFS. Some great “maturity” types of features and capabilities.

Some of my favorite features are;

IntelliTrace in Production. Yeah!
Stakeholder Feedback system
Async Team Explorer (though I’m not sure I like the look of it as shown. Not sure I like the new nav, but there are some things that look pretty cool in it, so I guess I can live with it ;)
New Workitem Dialog. Having the Description in its own pane is very nice…
The MyWork system looks interesting
New Backlog page/management. Though I wonder if this will be available for all Project templates (i.e. Agile and Scrum or… )? Still I think this could make Product Backlog management less “scary” for many Product Owners…
The Code Clone Detection. This looks like an awesome feature…