During the months of April, May and June, we are running a series of workshops on Application Lifecyle Management with Team system.  These workshops are not just about how to use the tools but ideas for improving your software development process.  There are four 2 hour workshops and each are offered about 4 times per month.  The are organized a live meeting events.  You can sign up for them here: www.almcatalyst.com.  Just click on the “Register” button and you will see a schedule that lists the dates and times each workshop is available.  Here’s a brief summary of what the workshops are about:

We designed the ALM Catalyst Live Workshops to enable development teams and achieve these key goals:

·         Understand the potential of Team Foundation Server in the enterprise

·         Maximizing the benefit from Team System

·         Create higher-quality, applause-generating software—with less time and stress

Topics covered include:

1. Keeping Projects on the Rails (Reporting) – Status reports shouldn’t be time sinks for teams to create and understand. This topic will demonstrate how Team Foundation Server reports can be easily prepared, keep a project on track and serve as critical decision-making tools to deal with inevitable project changes. Finally, this section of the workshop will feature a few typical “disasters,” preventable with TFS.

2. Avoiding Unpleasant Surprises (Deployment) – Software deployment should not be a dreaded task in the development process. By utilizing automated builds in Team Foundation Server, participants will better understand the health and organization of applications throughout the project, preventing the end-of-project surprise (the “bad kind”). This topic will demonstrate the benefit of automated builds and the calamities they can avert by dynamically assessing build quality.

3. Quality Matters (Testing) – Quality is everyone’s responsibility. Development teams should integrate quality checks throughout every phase of the development process rather than relegating it as the final, pre-deployment task. By utilizing Visual Studio Team System to manage testing tasks, test types, test automation and test results, quality is always front-of-mind with all team members. This topic will demonstrate how to fully integrate the software development lifecycle with quality assurance.

4. Making Process Stick – Strong process speeds development and increases software quality. When implemented properly process enables development teams and minimizes “workarounds” and inefficiencies. This topic will demonstrate a smoothly implemented process methodology in Team Foundation Server, customized for an organization and embraced by the development team.

These workshops will help customers understand and implement Team Foundation Server to help simplify and accelerate the software development process and improve quality for teams of all sizes.  

Brian