Pro Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012

Book Preface

You can have the best coders in the world working in your teams, but if your project management isn’t up to scratch, your project is almost certain to be delayed, to come in over budget, and in some cases, to fail entirely. By taking precise control of your application development process, you can make changes, both large and small, throughout your project’s life cycle that will lead to better-quality, finished products that are consistently delivered on time and within budget. Application lifecycle management (ALM) is an area of rapidly growing interest within the development community. Because its techniques allow you to deal with the process of developing applications across many areas of responsibility and across many different disciplines, its effects on your project can be wide-ranging and pronounced. It is a project management tool that has practical implications for the whole team—from architects to designers, from developers to testers.

Who This Book Is For

This book is for anyone interested in improving the development efforts in their organizations. It doesn’t matter if you are a manager, developer, tester, Scrum Master, or anything else. You can all benefit from what you will learn here. The Application Lifecycle Management process includes anyone involved in the lifecycle of an application, and Team Foundation Server 2012 and Visual Studio 2012 have something for each and every one of you. Maybe the most important lesson is that you are all working on the same team, and you are all responsible for the outcome of your development process. This realization cannot come from a tool like Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio. It is something that you need to figure out all by yourself.