Introducing the Visual Studio ALM Rangers – Neno Loje

This post is part of an ongoing series of Rangers introductions. See An index to all Rangers covered on this blog for more details.

Who you are?

I'm an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) consultant since the beginning of TFS (first final release was in 2006). Basically this includes everything necessary to help a software development company or team to achieve their goal: making their clients happy and delivering a high quality software in time and in budget with the features that the potential users care about.

Obviously this also includes administrative tasks like installing, upgrading, configuring, customization and troubleshooting TFS instances as well as more sophisticated consulting tasks like optimizing software development processes and training teams how to get the most out of TFS and Scrum.

You can read about those adventures on my VS ALM blog.

What makes you “tick”?

I realized that most projects I've been involved with failed not due to bad coding style or inadequate technologies that were used, but the challenges were all around people: Missing/Poor Requirements, Missing/Poor Architectural Design, Lack of communication between team members, Lacking integration of Product Marketing members and IT operations staff etc.

Where you live?

In Hamburg, Germany. Right next to a Microsoft regional office.

Where is the place you call home?

Probably the train restaurants, while travelling mostly through Germany and Switzerland.

Why are you active in the Rangers program?

Microsoft creates great software, but sometimes misses a written handbook and how to use their products efficiently and how to apply those tools to your team (and process). This is where the Rangers program fits in. A group of Microsoft and external, non-Microsoft experts – some freelancers, some working at other large companies – that have the mission to close that gap through documentation and additional tooling.

What is the best Rangers project you worked in and why?

Two of them – for users using TFS 2005/2008 already, the TFS 2010 Upgrade Guide is very important since it answers questions like "Can I survive the upgrade to TFS 2010 without loosing any data or history records?". Secondly, for users starting with TFS 2010 one of the most frequently asked questions is around branching strategy best practices – this is covered by the TFS Branching Guide 2010 (this is already the 3rd version).