Microsoft readies ALM upgrade

Microsoft has an ambitious wish list for a planned upgrade to its application lifecycle management platform, including offering its ALM server via a hosted model.

Support for databases such as Oracle and IBM DB2 also is on the long list of possible improvements cited during a VSLive conference presentation in San Francisco on Monday.

The planned Rosario version of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and the Team Foundation Server ALM server would feature three primary improvement areas: alignment of application development with the business, application quality and testing, and continuous improvement in the ALM core, according to Microsoft.

Under the business alignment “pillar” of improvements, investments include requirements traceability, integration with Microsoft Office Project Server, enterprise-class Project client integration, lightweight project management tools, and reporting.

In the area of application quality and testing, features are set to focus on test prioritization, test case management, automation, T-SQL (Transact SQL) quality tools, and historical debugging. Other improvements include gated code check-in and static analysis rule sets. Also, users would be able to offload a debugger onto a USB key, for portability. This feature is known as “debugger on a thumb drive” and drew a positive review from attendee Richard Stillwell, software change and configuration management analyst at RLI Insurance.

“It would make our lives so much easier,” by having a portable debugger for different client systems, Stillwell said.

Continuous improvements in the ALM core planned include administrative and operations improvements, source control enhancements, distributed build, source control branch visualization and offering the Team Foundation Server (TFS) ALM server as a hosted service.

TFS could be hosted by Microsoft and third-party providers. Users might pay $30 per month for a TFS server “and then you don’t have to maintain this thing,” said Microsoft’s Stephanie Saad, group manager for Visual Studio team System.

While there is no set date for the release of Rosario, Saad noted that Microsoft traditionally has had 18-24-month release cycles for its tools. The most recent release, Visual Studio Team System 2008, shipped in November 2007.

Microsoft, she said, sees software development connected with the business, project management and operations. The long-term vision is to bring all these together, she said.

While the company initially thought distributed development would be a focus, customers instead cited problem areas including aligning application development with the business and application quality and testing.

“There’s been a ton of feedback on needing better testing tools,” Saad said.

With Rosario, users would see a hierarchy of relationships in a project that breaks down into tasks. Predecessor-successor relationships also would be shown.

“This is our vision. You’ll be able to have hierarchical relationships in Visual Studio Team System,” she said.

Integration is planned with Project Server, which can merge data about multiple projects. 

Customized dashboards also are planned. “Our goal is to ship a set of customized dashboards out of the box,” Saad said. Integration with Instant Messaging also is eyed; audience members preferred the Yahoo, Skype, and Jabber systems. Users also would be able to use Microsoft Excel as a front end for iteration planning.

Excel could be used to show which developers are overbooked and under-booked, she said. Velocity-tracking, meanwhile, would show the progress of software projects and compare history.

Also eyed is a merger of Team System Web access capabilities and Microsoft SharePoint, to provide a unified point for information.

“We definitely see the long-term vision here as having a single point [of] access for everything on the Web,” said Saad.

Reporting would be highlighted as well. And Microsoft plans to provide information about what has changed in a software build.

Test prioritization and bug-tracking would be featured. Manual and robust automated testing would be improvement areas. A lightweight shell for testers is being considered as well.