What’s Next in Software Delivery?

Come and find out! Sam Guckenheimer, ALM expert, product planner for Visual Studio, and author of “Agile Software Engineering with Visual Studio: From Concept to Continuous Feedback” is coming to Toronto to talk about exactly that: “What’s Next in Software Delivery”, If you are in the Toronto area you can come out for a unique opportunity to meet and learn from him in person November 9th at Microsoft Canada Headquarters. Register today, as an added bonus, the first 10 who register will get a copy of Sam’s new book. There is nothing like getting a chance to hear from someone with first hand knowledge of the product and its development. For those of you who can’t attend, I can’t give offer Sam G, but there is an excellent blog post by Jason Zander on the ALM Roadmap you should check out.

You already know how to code with Visual Studio, this event is a great opportunity to learn from someone in the know about how Visual Studio can help you through the entire software development lifecycle.

Testing

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, and Visual Studio 2010 Professional (which is integrated into Team Foundation Server) includes a new application calledMicrosoft Test Manager .   You can create test plans, add test suites, test cases and link them to your requirements, and configurations to use when running your test cases. You can run manual tests or automated tests. You can submit bugs straight from Visual Studio or from Microsoft Test Manager. You can track progress and report on how much testing remains.

Project planning

Visual Studio allows you to plan and track projects . Create a high level plan that breaks your project into shippable increments, develop detailed plans to execute iterations to develop those increments. As you complete each iteration, refine the high level plan based on what you learned if needed. Take advantage of process templates to plan, develop, and track the project. use work items to track and manage your work and information about your project. You can use different types of work items to tack different types of work, such as user stories, customer requirements, product bugs, and development tasks. Manage dependencies across work items and collaborate across groups. Create and customize reports to track your team’s progress and highlight the data that matters to your project.

Modeling

Visual Studio ultimate allows you to create models to manage and define your application. Create models at different levels of detail, relate them to each other, or to test or to your development plan. Model user requirements, or get a visual representation of the code with dependency graphs and sequence diagrams, define the architecture,  or define acceptance tests or system tests based on your requirement models.

Visual Studio isn’t just a coding tool, it really is an Application Lifecycle Management tool You already know it. Make the most of it! Download a free trial and check it out for yourself and if you are in the Toronto area register now , and don’t miss this great chance to learn from the expert.