Getting Started With Application Lifecycle Management

Question

I'm a lead developer in a small development shop exclusively using Microsoft based solutions. We're currently implemently small to medium sized solutions using .NET 3.5 and SQL Server 2008 as a base. We also currently use Team Server simply for source control.

We have a larger project on the horizon and would like to start putting more process and structure around how we start, develop, maintain, and manage projects of this size.

My question is, are there ALM solutions that we can leverage that would fit well with our toolset and what are their strength's/weaknesses in general? We currently don't do much product planning or documenting of our begining development and would really like to change all that.

I've found all sorts of materials but organizing and making sense of it all is a bit overwhelming. Thanks!

Answer 1

You might check out ALM Catalyst they have some live workshops on using TFS during the full lifecycle.

Answer 2

The only official ALM toolset I'm aware about is Windows Team System 2010 (small development shop can get it almost free via the Microsoft BizSpark program).

I myself was in a similar position a few years ago (starting a dev shop oriented towards complex .NET solutions). Ended up with a custom development approach - mixture of Project Management (second version) with Agile approaches, with a heavy emphasis on low-friction and efficient development process.

I welcome you to check out some articles (and links they refer to) from my site that might help:

• Continuous Integration and more
• xLim approach