Building a Release Pipeline with TFS

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Leaders in the world of online businesses have shrunk the timeline for software delivery from months to days or even hours. No matter what size business you have, customers now expect features such as real-time customer service and frequent releases of services.

Enter: The patterns & practices (p&p) team. The goal of this new guidance is to put you on the road toward continuous delivery. By continuous delivery, they mean that through techniques such as versioning, continuous integration, automation, and environment management, you will be able to decrease the time between when you first have an idea and when that idea is realized as software that's in production. Any software that has successfully gone through your release process will be software that is production ready, and you can give it to customers whenever your business demands dictate. They also try to show that there are practical business reasons that justify every improvement you want to make. A better release process makes economic sense by providing:

  • Faster time to market
  • Better quality software
  • More productive employees

Along with the guide (which is designed to help testers and developers understand the role of Dev-Ops within the team and work flow and to build out a continuous delivery release pipeline using Team Foundation Server ALM tools) there are also Hands On Lab (HOL). These HOL’s show engineers how to implement a fully continuous delivery release pipeline with Visual Studio ALM Tools.

About patterns & practices

The Microsoft patterns & practices (p&p) team is responsible for delivering applied engineering guidance that helps software architects, developers, and their teams take full advantage of Microsoft’s platform technologies in their  application development project.

Their goal is to help software development teams be more successful with the Microsoft application platform. They do this by delivering guidance that:

  • Helps to simplify the Microsoft application platform
  • Provides solution guidance to common problems
  • Helps development teams grow their skills and learn

For more information about p&p visit their site.