Do You Have What It Takes To Be a Ranger?

The ALM Rangers recently celebrated their 10th birthday, and we are adding even more goodness with new DevOps and Cross-Platform support!  To make all that happen, we need more Rangers.  But what are the Rangers?  And why should you care?

The Rangers are a small group of professionals from all over the world who are passionate about the process of developing software.  The Rangers undertake a plethora of projects whose one unifying purpose is to make it easier to adopt and follow superior development methodologies.  Those projects fall into one of two broad types of delivery: guidance and tooling.

Formal Ranger guidance typically takes the form of a white paper, article, or video and is prepared and reviewed within the Ranger community for content, clarity, and crispness.  Some examples of guidance with which you may be familiar include branching and merging guidance, process template customization, and our Channel 9 demo series.  For a complete listing, just go here.

Guidance is meant to do just that – to guide front-line pros with direct information that is easy to consume and implement in their organizations.  The value is saved time while gaining the often substantial process improvements in their organization.

Tooling projects have the same goal but achieve it in a different way.  Whereas a guidance might discuss how to improve a process, tooling actually helps to make it happen.  For instance, much of the Ranger’s tooling efforts lately have been in creating extensions for Visual Studio Team Services, which extend the functionality of the tool in many helpful ways but which also serve as demonstration projects to show how organizations can create their own extensions.  To view all of the available Ranger tools, just go here.

Now that we’ve discussed what the Rangers do, let’s talk about who the Rangers are.  We love application lifecycle management and finding ways to improve the process of delivering software, which in turn drives application quality, increases delivery frequency, and reduces risk.  We are professionals with years and years of experience. 

One thing that might not be widely known is that Rangers are all volunteers with day jobs and families – which can make it tough to deliver high value and quality.  It takes a real passion for the processes, technology, and community to be so dedicated.  At the end of the day, though, it’s a real win-win when we can have a positive impact on our careers and users!

We are currently looking to expand our scope of impact into DevOps and Cross-Platform and are looking for experience and passion in those areas.  The bar to join the Rangers is quite high. The admissions team looks at not only a candidate’s career experience and knowledge but also any contributions that they’ve made to the ALM community in general and, of course, their passion for process.

If you make the cut, though, the benefits are manifest.  We are a tight, friendly community and have a lot of fun working on projects together.  The projects are practical and meaningful to practitioners the world over.  We get to work on the very cutting edge of technology and process knowledge.  Rangers get branded shirts and other swag regularly, too, which brings me to possibly the best reason of all to be a Ranger – the prestige and camaraderie of being amongst some of the very best ALM and DevOps professionals in the world.

If you are interested in becoming a Ranger yourself, head over here for complete details.  We can’t wait to hear from you!