Considering a move to a new ALM environment? Every team has at least one existing system that is critical to the success of their business. To move everybody over at the same time is usually too risky and inconvenient. What happens to all those automated tools and processes that use the current system? What if something doesn't work right? How do you roll back to the previous system? One of the best ways to mitigate the changeover risk is to run both systems in parallel. This lets people get comfortable with the new system and allows tools to be switched over gradually. This session will cover the general considerations and best practices for mirroring, along with how the TFS Integration Tools can help you move between ALM environments.

Panel discussion on Application Lifecycle Managment best practices.

In under four years, Mylyn’s task-focused interface has gone from a university whiteboard to a tool with over a million monthly downloads. The next big step in the evolution of developer tools is becoming more clear. Tasks and work items are more important than files, focus is more important than features, and an explicit context is a great way to automatically connect software planning to production. The Eclipse Mylyn project has restructured the integrated development environment (IDE) interaction around tasks, connecting the developer’s workflow to Agile and ALM systems. Integrating with over 50 different ALM systems, Mylyn provides the developer with unified access and features such as cross-repository linking and Agile planning. In this talk we will be announcing new developments around Mylyn that will be bringing these integration and productivity benefits to users of Microsoft TFS and developers based in Visual Studio.

These two approaches have been "dating" each other for years. Jon Bach thinks they were made for each other, so at the Agile 2010 conference, he officially pronounced them "married". Why? Each produces rapid feedback, emphasizes responding to change, and requires learning (or spikes). Jon Bach will show show you how to make exploration accountable (and measurable) in an Agile context, despite the myth that exploratory testing is unscripted, unstructured, and random.

Switching to Agile practices is a big paradigm shift, especially for testers. It not only requires a change in tester’s mindset but also appropriate tools are needed to help team members collaborate, to add transparency in the system and to reduce waste. In this session, Vinod Malhotra will cover how Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Ultimate help testers become first class citizens in Agile teams and fulfill the promise of rapid and more frequent delivery of customer value.

As mainstream companies have adopted Agile practices, a consensus has been emerging around both the social and technical practices that yield the highest ROI. There are broadly available examples of merging Agile into existing organizations and prioritizating cultural change for the highest return. This talk surveys the business contexts, techniques, tooling and results.

When Ido Eshed was invited to help build and deploy a Requirements Management (RM) process at a big electronics company, he brought with him his 10 year experience from IBM. But after a short while, he discovered TFS as an ALM process engine that supports all disciplines, including RM, and made a quick and successful transition into the TFS world. The session will discuss the business problems that were identified in the existing RM process, the new practices that were recommended as a solution, and how TFS helps implementing them while focusing on Team collaboration, process enforcement and continuous measurement.

Software development field research has shown that shared group awareness, coordination and informal communication are the most common ways for software development teams to inform each other of progress. In addition, we have observed that poorly documented, informal communication causes a fragmented workday due to frequent interruptions and knowledge loss due to the passage of time and team attrition. Because informal communication has both advantages and disadvantages for information sharing, it merits deeper study to allow any proposed treatment to preserve the good while reducing the bad. Over the past several years, we have conducted a series of studies at Microsoft Corporation and beyond to document the nature of development team conversations and communications. Based on surveys, lab studies, field studies and interviews, we have begun to develop a suite of tools that allow development teams, both co-located and distributed, to stay more aware of their colleagues’ actions, get o

Discover how third-party vendors fill the gaps and add value to the Microsoft's ALM platform. Whether you need Outlook integration, Agile planning or release management, there is a solution available today. Learn the criteria for evaluating how third-party products integrate seamlessly with your ALM platform. Overall, discover how to build an ALM platform that enable the whole team (Stakeholders, Analysts, Developers, and Testers) to work together to produce quality products.

What values does your software process embody? In my experience most team members cannot answer this question or often respond with something more like practices. This is not sufficient because if you are doing the practice you need to understand how the practice fits in the overall process. In this session Jim Newkirk, Director of Development, Tools & Deployment, Microsoft, discusses the importance of determining values, making sure they are well known to your team members and how to choose practices that support these values.

With the 2010 release, the Visual Studio product line has grown from the best individual development environment but as the best team collaboration environment as well. Technical Fellow Brian Harry will discuss the roadmap that will extend to cover the needs of the organization beyond the development and test team, encompassing stakeholders and operations, in a distributed world of mixed on- and off-premises computing. What are the principles that drive us, what have we learned from our customers, what practices have we learned from the industry?

Tony Scott, Corporate Vice President and CIO, Microsoft Corporation, discusses the type of innovation that propels organizations forward.

Confused.com - a large UK based price comparison site - depends on the ability of its development team to quickly turn market opportunities into consumer products. In 2009, the IT team evaluated the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 product stack. Its team members were confident that its support for Agile processes and end to end automation, along with out of the box testing would significantly cut the time it takes to get new products to market – and it did. This session outlines the journey it took from assessment to implementation and roll-out with a focus on end to end automation using Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management.

Alistair Cockburn once recommended a “methodology per project”. We have found that multiple methodologies frequently coexist in related projects. Stephanie Cuthbertson, Group Program Manager, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Microsoft, will share successful examples of both agile and traditional projects and hybrid contexts in which the two styles coexist successfully in the same organization.

Continuous integration is at the hub of most agile teams, but today it only extends to the compilation of source code and running of unit tests. But wouldn’t it be even more compelling if you could extend the integration to automatically provision a virtualized test environment with all tiers of a distributed system and see automatically the completed requirements in the build, the tests now ready to run, and the bug fixes ready to verify? Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Ultimate can help make this continuous delivery a reality. In this session, Amit Chopra will showcase the end of end experiences of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate features that enable a continuous delivery of high quality bits from development to test and from test team to production like test environments in a tightly integrated manner, eliminating common issues such as no-repro of bug, improving develop & test collaboration, and making complex environment setups a breeze.

Lean, Agile, Dev Ops are just some of the buzz words being used to describe the transformation of the value stream of application delivery. But what does that mean for the discipline of Application Lifecycle Management? In this talk Dave West, principle Analyst from Forrester Research describes the state of Application Delivery and how major trends such as Agile and Lean are forcing change on ALM. He will paint a picture of modern ALM practices that replace focus on artifacts and stage gates with flow, cadence and transparency. He highlights organizations that have embarked on the transformation and describes the steps they are following.

John Szurek, Director of IT Research and Practice, Clear Clannel discusses the software development lifecycle process at Clear Channel and how they chose the best tools available for their environment, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. He also discusses how they did the hard process work, carefully defining disciplines, roles, workstreams, and work products. They called this their Solutions Framework, and they documented it, tested it, and trained it. Although they were proud of it and proud of themselves, their success was limited, and it often felt more like failure. This presentation will explore the how and why of the failures, but they refuse to let the story end there. The hard lessons they learned are feeding their next iteration. They are improving unit testing and code review practices to assure that developers cannot simply pass their issues on to create major problems for testing. They are improving consistency and governance across projects with a center of excellence c

Drew Fletcher, Director Program Management, Engineering Excellence, Microsoft, provides an overview of how Microsoft is managing change through its scenario-focused engineering practices.