Last week at TechEd North America the ALM capabilities of the next version of Visual Studio (vNext) started to be unveiled. There’s plenty of material out there so I thought I’d summarise what’s been announced and where to find out more.

Capabilities

• Agile Planning Tools
  • New web based product backlog, sprint planning and taskboard.
• Lightweight Requirements
  • StoryBoard Assistant; a plug-in for PowerPoint that connects the creation and review of story boards with the rest of the team.
• Stakeholder Feedback
  • New tooling support to invite and receive feedback from stakeholders during development.
• Continuous Testing
  • A new unit test runner continuously running unit tests in the background.
• Agile Quality Assurance
  • Increased code quality with code review support, enhanced unit testing frameworks and new exploratory testing support. Note for C++ developers, this includes native C++ unit tests for the first time, and other enhancements.
• Enhanced User Experience
  • More time ‘in the zone’, through improved experiences for day-to-day tasks.
• Aligning Development with Operations
  • Increased connections and insight between the operations and development teams lowering the time it takes to fix a bug in production.

Information

If you’d like to find out more about any of the above vNext capabilities then there are several routes available:

SpeakFlow

SpeakFlow is a Silverlight-powered way of delivering rich, interactive content. This SpeakFlow allows you to follow the lifecycle – from development to operations and back again – and view short demonstrations of how Visual Studio vNext. It’s available both online and offline.

TechEd Session

A 60-minute, demo-heavy presentation by Cameron Skinner and Brian Keller:

Whitepaper

A PDF Whitepaper on Visual Studio vNext Application Lifecycle Management:

Well worth putting a little time aside to get an overview of the ALM features in vNext.

Cheers,
Giles