ALM with VS 2012 and TFS 2012: What’s New for ALM in Visual Studio 2012?

After looking at various ways to better manage your application’s lifecycle over our 9 previous posts, we will finally look at what’s new for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) using Visual Studio 2012. In case you haven’t read any of my previous posts, please do so (series overview; part one: Teams without Barriers; part two: TFS Online; part three: Tool Overview; part four: Before You Begin; part five: Backlog Management; part six: Exploratory Testing; part seven: My Work; and part eight: Storyboarding; part nine: Customer Feedback).

Today we will talk about some of the important and interesting feature updates in Visual Studio that make your Application Lifecycle Management even better.

Some of those feature updates to ALM in Visual Studio 2012 are:

Planning and Tracking

• Create and manage product backlogs, sprints, and tasks.

• Ability to run daily standups with a task board.

• Support multiple teams within a team project. For example,  sub-teams such as development team, dev-ops team, and the database team. You can manage all teams under one umbrella and still manage them separately if you want to.

• You can engage stakeholders or product owners to provide feedback about pre-release software.

• Illustrate requirements with PowerPoint storyboarding and link the storyboards to work items.

Architecture, Modeling, and Design

• Create, read, and edit dependency graphs faster and more easily.

• Create UML class diagrams from C# code to communicate with others.

• Implement your design more quickly by generating C# code from UML class diagrams.

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Developer Tools

• Work efficiently by organizing work and reducing the impact of interruptions using My Work and Pending Changes under Team Explorer.

• Increase transparency and collaboration to produce quality code by using Code Reviews.

• Integrate testing into the developer workflow using Test Explorer.

• Use Code Clone Analysis to find duplicate code in your solution.

• Review web requests in IntelliTrace recordings for ASP.NET Web applications hosted on IIS 7.0 or later.

Testing

• Conduct exploratory test sessions.

• Quickly track your test plan results using the Results Tab in Microsoft Test Manager.

• Install and configure agents more easily for Lab Management for Visual Studio 2012.

• Include SCVMM 2012 and clustered Hyper-V hosts in Lab Management for Visual Studio 2012.

Team Foundation Build

• Define the build and run automated build processes in a hosted deployment of TFS by connecting it to an on-premises or hosted build controller.

• Increase the efficiency of your gated check-in build process by configuring it to build multiple check-ins at the same time.

• Run native and third party framework unit tests using Visual Studio Test Runner.

• Using Team Explorer, you can easily access, organize and get information about the builds that matter most to you using the Builds page in the Team Explorer.

• Get full diagnostics of the builds even if you don’t drop them on the server, which makes your debugging of the builds easy.

Version Control

• You can work in local workspaces either in or outside of Visual Studio, even when you are not connected to Team Foundation Server.

• Manage your work, reduce the impact of impediments that come up, and facilitate collaboration with your team with My Work and Pending Changes under Team Explorer.

• Conduct reviews of active, suspended, or checked-in code.

• Full control over changesets and shelvesets using My Work and Pending Changes.

• Review and modify code changes very easily using the enhanced Diff window.

This is officially the end our 10-part blog series on Application Lifecycle Management. I hope you enjoyed reading the series as much as I did writing it. Be sure to follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn for more great tips.  Have a question related to the blog series or ALM in general?  Use the comments section below to join the conversation.

• Visual Studio 2012
• Application Lifecycle Management
• ALM
• Team Foundation Server 2012