Jaliya's Blog: Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management(ALM)

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management(ALM)

Visual Studio ALM or Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management is a collection of integrated software development tools developed by Microsoft. These tools include IDEs, testing tools, source control, work items, collaboration, metrics, and reporting tools.

If you consider Visual Studio editions, there are mainly four versions of Visual Studio. Visual Studio Test Professional, Visual Studio Professional, Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate.

Visual Studio Test Professional is mainly for Quality Assuarance guys and there is nothing interesing for developers there. Visual Studio Professional is the most basic edition among the three developer editions. Average powered edition is Visual Studio Premium. If you have Visual Studio Ultimate, then you have like you have got everything. It is the most powered, most featured Visual Studio edition you can ever have.

You can use Visual Studio ALM features in Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate in combination with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. And the sad thing is Visual Studio Test Professional and Visual Studio Professional is not supported for Visual Studio ALM.

What is Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) is the collaboration platform at the core of the Visual Studio solution for application lifecycle management. TFS is mainly responsible for source control, data collection, reporting, and project tracking, and is intended for collaborative software development.

What we can do with Visual Studio ALM

Manage application's lifecycle by using the suite of tools in Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate in combination with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.
Better understand customer needs and more effectively design, implement, and deploy code.
Plan and track the project. Enact processes and monitor their quality of the team.
Design functionality, either on top of existing assets or from scratch, by using architectural diagrams.
Write, unit test, debug, analyze, and profile the application by using tools that are integrated with the rest of the application lifecycle so that team can understand how their progress contributes to the project. Use version control to manage the source code and other files.
Build the application by using an integrated build system so that the team can ensure that quality gates have been met and verify that requirements have been fulfilled in each build.
Test the application by running manual or automated tests, including performance and stress tests. Manage testing systematically so that the team knows the software quality on any given day.
Deploy into virtual environments to enable more sophisticated development and testing.

Team Foundation Server & Visual Studio