ALM Rangers … an update on our exciting journey :)
It is time to reflect back on the past 10 months and give you a glimpse of what the ALM Rangers are planning for the next 2 months.
Starting the Gig Adventure
In September 2011 we embarked on the biggest and most ambitious “Gig” to deliver Visual Studio Readiness tooling and guidance. The quest to sim-ship with Visual Studio, dogfood the latest and greatest technology and scale to twenty concurrent projects was an extreme test scalability, engineering practises and commitment by the part-time and geographically dispersed ALM Rangers family.
Sim-Shipping with Visual Studio 11 BETA
On February 29th we sim-shipped with Visual Studio 11 BETA (Welcome to Visual Studio 11 ALM Rangers Readiness Beta “Wave”), adding support for Visual Studio 11 to our out-of-band solutions (Get the latest Visual Studio ALM Rangers Solutions). The download https://vsarguidance.codeplex.com/releases/view/85868 contains a white paper that summarizes our dogfooding journey of https://TFSPreview, a service that allowed us to deliver application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities to every Ranger around the world.
Raising our awareness
We are working hard to raise the awareness of the ALM Rangers, making an appearance in MSDN Flash (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/hh967416 and https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/cc524082.aspx), Codeproject (How the Visual Studio ALM Rangers use Team Foundation Service to Get Ready for Visual Studio 11), monthly Ranger flashes, and soon topics on TFS Integration Tools and Working with the TFS OM article will be emerging in MSDN Magazine.
Fine tuning our infrastructure
In the background we have Jeff Bramwell, Jim Szubryt, David V. Corbin, Robert MacLean and Prasanna Ramkumar working hard to make the Rangers infrastructure more Ranger-friendly and effective. Constantly responding to technical and project management challenges, and reacting to Ranger feedback is no easy task … but the infrastructure working group is a tenacious bunch of ALM Rangers 
The next two months … freeze, scrub and recognize!
Apart from working hard to freeze the 20 projects that are making up the “GIG” wave for the Release Candidate (RC) release, we are also in the process of preparing for the implementation of the new ecosystem (Understanding the Visual Studio ALM Rangers) and planning for the next wave of out-of-band projects.
If you have ideas for future ALM Ranger out-of-band solutions, please refer to (Have you got an idea for a new or an existing ALM Rangers solution?) and raise your voice!
Keep an eye on this space for news on the next wave of the Visual Studio Readiness “Gig” and keep your candid feedback flowing in!