Bridging the Gap with ALM

Our friends at TechNet Edge captured some great conversations on the ground at TechEd North America 2011. Check out Jason Zander talking with Richard Campbell about Visual Studio vNext, specifically the upcoming ALM features.

Jason talked about bringing everyone on the team together and in the past that meant bridging the gap between architects, DBA’s, project manager’s and developers. Now add to that mix the business stakeholder and IT operations. The former has a new storyboard tool for PowerPoint that they can use to mock up screens (i.e. add buttons, images, links, etc). This functionality does two things: 1) there’s no need to learn a new tool as most people understand Office, or in this case PowerPoint and 2) the idea is captured in high fidelity and not lost in translation.

As for the operations staff, they can now leverage System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to pass data to the development team so they can triage the issues and find the root cause in the code itself. This occurs through the integrated connection with Team Foundation Server (TFS). Since TFS is involved the work item created by the operations team includes rich and actionable data for the developer (environmental data, stack trace, AVICode telemetry, etc.) letting them rapidly identify the issue and jump directly to the related line of code with a single click.

Those are just some of the highlights so definitely check out the video and visit TechNet Edge for more videos, screencasts, podcasts, and articles to help you stay up to date on the latest Microsoft technologies.