Visual Studio vNext Application Lifecycle Management

Last week at TechEd North America the ALM capabilities of the next version of Visual Studio (vNext) started to be unveiled. There’s plenty of material out there so I thought I’d summarise what’s been announced and where to find out more.

Capabilities

  • Agile Planning Tools
    • New web based product backlog, sprint planning and taskboard.
  • Lightweight Requirements
    • StoryBoard Assistant; a plug-in for PowerPoint that connects the creation and review of story boards with the rest of the team.
  • Stakeholder Feedback
    • New tooling support to invite and receive feedback from stakeholders during development.
  • Continuous Testing
    • A new unit test runner continuously running unit tests in the background.
  • Agile Quality Assurance
    • Increased code quality with code review support, enhanced unit testing frameworks and new exploratory testing support. Note for C++ developers, this includes native C++ unit tests for the first time, and other enhancements.
  • 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.

Information

If you’d like to find out more about any of the above vNext capabilities then there are several routes available:

SpeakFlow

SpeakFlow is a Silverlight-powered way of delivering rich, interactive content. This SpeakFlow allows you to follow the lifecycle – from development to operations and back again – and view short demonstrations of how Visual Studio vNext. It’s available both online and offline.

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TechEd Session

A 60-minute, demo-heavy presentation by Cameron Skinner and Brian Keller:

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Whitepaper

A PDF Whitepaper on Visual Studio vNext Application Lifecycle Management:

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Well worth putting a little time aside to get an overview of the ALM features in vNext.

Cheers,
Giles