Visual Studio vNext Application Lifecycle Management

Article
05/24/2011

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.