Visual Studio vNext Preview Web[1]

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Visual Studio vNext:

Application LifecycleManagementImproving the productivity and predictability of

software construction for teams of all sizes

PREVIEWCONT

ENT


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2011 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This document is provided as-is. Information and views expressed in this

document, including URL and other Internet Web site references, may change without notice. You bear the risk of using it.

This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft

product. You may copy and use this document for your internal, reference purposes.

On May 16, 2011 at TechEd North America Microsoft offered a glimpse of the future for

Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management tools. This whitepaper is designed to

provide additional context and outline the problems we are setting out to solve, how

they relate to problems we face as an industry and how, together, we can improve the

effectiveness of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) process.


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ContentsContinuous Change in Stakeholder Expectations 2

Modern Application Lifecycle Management 3

Application Lifecycle 3

Adapting to Market Forces 4

Reducing Waste across the Lifecycle 4

Embracing Agile Development Best Practices 5

Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management 6

Laying the Foundation VS2005 & VS2008 6

Reducing Waste in Software Construction VS2010 6

Visual Studio vNext: Expanding Throughout the Lifecycle and Embracing New Participants 8

Agile Planning Tools 9

Lightweight Requirements 13

Stakeholders Feedback 15

Agile Quality Assurance 18

Aligning Development with Operations 21

Enhanced User Experience 23

Closing 26


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For the launch of Visual Studio 2010 the tag line was /* Life Ru Cde */. This was to emphasize that so

many human activities are intertwined with software. The opportunities to create new experiences, which

turn data into insight and transform ideas into action, have never been as abundant as they are now.

However as an industry we continue to fall short of our full potential - the majority of money

spent on information technology is not in the creation of new value for the user but instead in maintaining

existing solutions, managing risk and addressing communication bottlenecks inherent in the process.

This results in an inefficient use of resources and limits the ability to meet customer needs.

Over the years the industry has worked to improve the

effectiveness and predictability of development. While the

effectiveness of many parts of the software construction,

support and maintenance process have undergone significant

productivity enhancements, much of the progress has been made

in silos of productivity. The vast majorit y of waste in the processis still in the handoffs and transitions across the lifecycle, these

sources of waste have not yet been sufficiently addressed.

The situation is amplified by the fact that stakeholders expect more

from software. With the transition to the cloud the expectation is

that updates to production systems to occur in minutes not days or weeks, the user experience on consumer

devices such as your mobile phone are expected for enterprise systems as well. We are in a stage of increasing

demands across the team, which necessitates that we become more connected than in any time in the past .

Over the last five years Microsoft has been on a journey to help teams be as

effective as possible and to tackle this broader set of issues. We have set out tocreate an Application Lifecycle Management offering which prioritizes:

Collaboration through integration across all roles in the team

Timely and actionable feedback to reduce wasted effort

Leveraging natural and appropriate tools for the task at hand

Transparent and agile best practices to be adopted at will

At TechEd North America, we illustrated a number of scenarios that span Visual Studio vNext and a set of

associated integrations. These scenarios improve the creation, maintenance and support of software solutions

by focusing on improving the workflow across the entire team as well as and across the entire lifecycle.

This whitepaper will provide additional context and outline the problems we are committed to resolving,

how they relate to problems diff iculties we face as an industry and how, together, we can improve the

effectiveness of Application Lifecycle Management.

Continuous Change in

Stakeholder Expectations

the majority of money spent

on information technology

is not in the creation of

new value for the user

The situation is amplified by

the fact that stakeholders

expect more from software


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Traditional application lifecycle management approaches have made the assumption that the creation of

software development projects is a straightforward and sequential process. The underlying assumption is that

requirements can be understood easily and should be adequately defined up front, with resultant phases of the

project executed upon this static baseline.

However, this is almost never the case; its very diff icult if not impossible to understand all of the requirements

of a software development project up front. Unfortunately, many of the legacy approaches to Application

Lifecycle Management fail to acknowledge this fac t, causing teams to use inef fective collaboration tools that

often fall short of success.

Application Lifecycle

Software should be viewed as a living asset, with the Application Lifecycle representing a continuum

across the connected activities of a products lifetime, spanning: the identification of business needs, software

construction, release management and monitoring, support and maintenance, through to the eventual

retirement of the solution.

Two flows are critical across the lifecycle which span multiple teams, roles and individuals:

1. concept to working systems shortening time to value, and

2. discovery of an issue to resolution lowering mean time to resolution

An Application Lifecycle Management toolset must support these f lows and accelerate

the transitions between the development team and the operations team.

Modern Application

Lifecycle Management

Figure 1 :Establishing a

Flow between Development

and Operations ALM

As new requirements are

established applications

evolve. There is a tight

connection between the

development and operations

team, wherever hand-offs

exist there is potential for

bottlenecks to occur.

DEVELOP OPERATE

Sprint Monitor

RequirementsProductBacklog

OperationsBacklog

Working Software


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Adapting to Market Forces

Almost all segments of the industry are being pushed to achieve more. Organizations of all sizes are

grappling with a number of issues that demand they continue to mature their approach to application creation,

support and maintenance. As an industry, we see dynamics such as:

Toolsets need to embrace these forces they must help teams deliver value faster than ever before

across myriad technologies while addressing the inherit complexity of solutions and supporting effec tive

communication across the entire team regardless of scale or location.

Reducing Waste across the Lifecycle

Waste is created when gaps in the workflow of teams exist, these gaps are typified by handoffs and

ineffecti ve processes that impede the ability of the team to interact. For example, when individuals are:

Successful, modern Application Lifecycle Management systems mus t have a specific focus on eliminatingthe sources of waste. This is only possible through rich and actionable integrations that span project

contributors and the provision of a single, integrated master data store allowing rich insight into the

overall status and health of the project.

Increased opportunities

ongoing maturation of the underlying

technology and supporting processes

such as cloud computing

Increased complexity

as a result of the

ability to create more connected,

composite and heterogeneous systems

leading to more diverse systems

Increased pressure

drive to deliver results at an increased pace

and with reduced resources such as

increased use of outsourcing

Increased communication

additional participants in software projects

as we ensure the best possible experience is

delivered

Not exposed to context across the

totality of the project misaligned and competing priorities

Unable to share sufficient context

waste is created by

handoffs across the team and disciplines that

become non-actionable, creating re-work

Are forced to work with

unnatural tools

time spent learning tools and being

forced to repetitively shift context

Are forced to adopt processes they

dont understand

Increased overhead and lost cycles

of productivity


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Embracing Agile Development Best Practices

Agile approaches to software development and, in par ticular, Scrum have become increasing popular.

Key underlying goals common to these approaches are to dramatically improve visibility across the

project team, improve interactivity bet ween team members and increase the flow of value to the customer.

Many best practices exist across Agile approaches. These practices can be adopted incrementally and

applied to almost any project and process, including formal approaches such as CMMI or traditional approach-

es such as water fall. These approaches can involve product back-logs, iterations or sprints, daily stand-ups,

task boards, burn-down charts, st akeholder feedback, unit testing, pair programming, etc.

Stakeholder Gives Feedback

FeedbackIncorporated

Daily Cycles

Runa Sprint

Plana Sprint

Manage theBacklog

Telling thestory

Ask forFeedback

Deploy toStakeholders

Application Lifecycle Management solutions must allow you to leverage Agile best practices while adapting and

supporting your current approach so you can incrementally leverage those practices as you see fit. They also need to

provide a platform to scale the processes to work within the needs of your organization.

Figure 2: Continuous

Application Delivery

the core elements of

the Agile workflow

enable teams tofocus on continuous

application delivery.


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Visual Studio Application

Lifecycle ManagementThe technologies demonstrated at TechEd build on past Visual Studio releases; they represent a sample of our

third major release of Microsofts Application Lifecycle Management solution. Its useful to reflect back on our

earlier strategies to understand how they connect with the evolution of our offering.

Figure 3: Bringing the team Together The rst two major waves of innovation connected many parts of the teamtogether creating trustworthy and transparent bridges to improve the ow of information.

Laying the Foundation VS2005 & VS2008

When Visual Studio Team System first launched in 2005, the focus was on delivering

transparency by creating a igle data tre that housed a traparet backlg f wrk for theentire team (Team Foundation Server).

This data store was tightly integrated with a cutmizable develpmet prce so the system could be

set up in multiple configurations adapting to your specific needs. The integration between the development

environment and the data store l et developers take items off the shared backlog of work. Once they completed

a change, they could leverage the itegrated check-i experiece to connect the completed work with the

related work-items directly within the Visual Studio development environment.

This created a transparent process where developers could go about their day-to-day work

and, with minimal effort, ensure that the project plan was up-to-date. The team could view

autmated, real-time reprt and the project management team could leverage their favrite tlsuch as Microsoft Project to track progress.

Reducing Waste in Software Construction VS2010

In our most recent release, Visual Studio 2010, the focus was on further enhancing the flow of

information across the team and improving software quality. We connected the quality assurance process

with the development team and made udertadig exitig ytem ad deigig ytem deeply

connected parts of the development lifecycle.


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We introduced a set oftl built frm the grud up t let teter actively participate i the

lifecycle and permitted, for the first time, these closely connected ac tivities (development and testing)

share a common view of success.

We created a virtualized lab evirmet with itegrated quality dahbard that offered a full

360-degree view on progress. We also supported scenarios where testers could easily file bugs that

included all of the metadata a developer needed to reproduce. These scenarios also addressed the back-

and-forth game of bug Ping-Pong between teams one of the primar y causes of waste in teams.

In addition, we brought the benefits of our vision to developers on other platforms with

firt party upprt fr the Eclipe develpmet evirmet Macintosh, Windows and Linux. This

let teams working on a broad por tfolio of composite and heterogeneous applications share the benef its

of a shared team collaboration infrastructure.


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Visual Studio vNext: Expanding

Throughout the Lifecycle and

Embracing New ParticipantsWith Visual Studio vNext we set out to improve the f low of information between the voice of the customer (a

role referred to as the Product Owner in SCRUM) and the Team and between the Product Ownerand the customer Stakeholders.

We have also continued our focus on driving better software quality in every cycle of development,

from check in to sprint. We free the team from distractions and keep them in the zone by automating many of

the common interactions and bookkeeping activities.

Lets look at several of the scenarios we shared at TechEd that are part of Visual Studio vNext:

Agile Planning Tools

transparency across the planning

process and full team participation.

Tools scale as required and best

practices can be adopted at your

pace

Lightweight Requirements

a natural way to capture and receive

feedback on requirements early in

the process

Stakeholder Feedback

as a result of the

working code which matches the

expectations of stakeholders.

New tools to receive and

adapt to feedback throughout

the development process

Agile Quality Assurance

increased code quality with code

review support, enhanced unit

testing frameworks and new

exploratory testing support

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

Enhanced User Experience

more time in the zone,

through improved experiences

for day-to-day tasks


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Figure 4: Grooming the Product Backlog The product backlog shows a single view of the current

backlog of work that can be dynamically re-ordered and grouped.

This enables Product Owner to quickly prioritize work and outline dependencies and relationships.

Agile Planning Tools

As a project progresses, planned work evolves and new work is discovered whether its the

development of a new user story, the discovery of an issue in production or the fact that a team member

is called out of the office for the day. As these changes occur the plan also needs to evolve Agile teams

expect and embrace change.

In Visual Studio vNext, we offer a variety of tools to let the entire team actively participate in

the planning process in ways that are both natural to the user and allow them to stay in contextwith the work they are performing.

Our tools dont force you to adopt a specific process. Instead, they let you leverage Agile best

practices. They also enable these best practices to be executed at scale with integrations to portfolio

management tools and the ability to manage large geographically distributed teams.


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Figure 5: Planning a Sprint Once work is prioritized, its time for the team to plan the next sprint/i teration,

identify the tasks and star t allocating the work.

The enhanced work item management tools in Team Web Access make this process simple by pre-populating

required data and streamline the association and update process.

The sprint planning tools help your team effec tively allocate work balancing load with available capacity.

In this screenshot interactive bar charts show team member capacity and the burn down progress for the

project. Enabling real-time feedback on the updates to the plan.


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Figure 6: Task Board in Team Web Access The task board offer s the ability to update the status of work

items visually. Its a popular way to see the progress a team is making against each product backlog i tem and

to get a quick focus on remaining work.

The task board adheres to the business rules set out in the process template, such as state

transitions, regardless of the template chosen for the project .

Integrated into the taskboard is a real-time burndown chart of the remaining work in the teams sprint.


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Figure 7: Connecting with Project Server This provides up-to-date insight into portfolio execution,

alignment with strategic objectives and resource utilization of software development projects by

leveraging the data stored in different systems.

This automates the exchange of project information across teams and improves coordination between teams

by using disparate methodologies, like Waterfall and Agile, via common data and agreed upon metrics.

Agile teams can continue to think in terms of the product backlog and user stories and the PMO can continue

to manage resources across the enterprise.


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Lightweight Requirements

Teams need to collaborate with stakeholders to ensure that a new experience (whether it be an

enhancement to an existing solution or a fresh new concept) hits the mark. Storyboards have emerged as a

great best practice to ensure you get detailed feedback before the process of coding starts.

In Visual Studio vNext we provide a StoryBoard Assistant a plug-in for PowerPoint that

connects the creation and review of story boards with the rest of the team. The Assistant adds in a

Storyboarding Ribbon to help team members create a storyboard and share it with the team and

stakeholders. We include a library of common controls for multiple application types and tools to

allow the team to provide feedback on the experience.

Figure 8: Example Storyboard Slides - four examples that leverage the StoryBoard Assistant plug-in. Across

these screenshots you can see mock-ups of a Windows Phone interface, and screens from a media-centric

Web application, a SharePoint application and Visual Studio itself.


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Figure 9 The StoryBoard Assistant in Power Point: offers the abilit y to quickly mockup experiences in a tool

that is familiar to the majority of team members and stakeholders.

It includes a set of rich features that lend themselves to story boarding such as: inbuilt graphical design tools the ability to embed other content including context slides tools to capture screen shots and create lightweight animations grouping capabilities that store common elements within a shape librar y

The ability to create master templates that simplif y the creation of multiple similar views

The collaboration tools within Power Point also greatly assist the feedback process by providing the ability to: present the concepts to others

mail the document to others for feedback print the document place the document under version control leverage collaborative editing tools leverage web viewing tools


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Figure 10: Asking for Stakeholder Feedback - The Product Owner defines the feedback they want to

receive from the stakeholder and can then kick off the feedback process via e-mail.

Stakeholder Feedback

Essential to Agile is the idea of frequent feedback. As stakeholders work with a solution, they

understand the problem better and are able to envision improved ways of solving it. Developers often

express the frustration that they built exactly what the customer asked for, and then the customer

said thats not what I meant .

We carefully considered this as we designed Visual Studio vNext. We asked ourselves how teams

could easily receive timely feedback on working code, so that they could adjust their backlogs torespond to stakeholder needs in every sprint. If we could design that, Visual Studio vNext could

dramatically increase the flow of information between the stakeholders and the team, supporting

Agile workflows, accelerating delivery, and driving risk and waste out of the project.

With Visual Studio vNext we deliver a set of natural tools that let stakeholders directly participate in

the development process. In this way, teams receive dramatically more actionable feedback and they

can transparently prioritize and track feedback against the backlog. They can both remain focused on

the task at hand and adapt for remaining work.


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Figure 11: Collating feedback on a web site the stakeholder feedback tool records feedback on the web site.

The tool is purposely built for stakeholder use. It allows the user to directly interact wi th the site

while recording rich and ac tionable data for the team in the background i.e. action scripts,

annotations, screenshots, audio.

This lets a Stakeholder provide rich and actionable data directly to the team helping

them stay on track with the intent of the scenario.


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Figure 12: Prioritizing and acting on feedback As feedback comes back in, the team prioritizes and

allocates work among the team members for the next sprint.

Feedback is simply a rich and actionable work item, automatically linked to the appropriate user stor y providing

the required context so the team can act on, associate with other work and schedule into Sprints as required.

Teams can achieve the goal of continued feedback throughout the lifecycle helping them better

meet customer needs.


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Agile Quality Assurance

Software quality is affected at every cycle. Building on the capabilities of Visual Studio 2010, we have

continued to improve the tools we offer for increasing software quality, this includes:

the ability of the individual developer to focus on the correct unit testing first

tools to enable the team to collaborate on new code or refactor existing code

tools to support testers who are performing exploratory testing to discover

bugs that are still present after the build

Figure 13: Continuous Unit Testing Development is about staying in the groove. The new Unit Test

Runner helps you do that by running tests in the background while youre working on code, so you

never have to pause and wait for test results.

Combined with Test Impact Analysis (introduced in VS 2010), the most important tests are always

run first, so failures appear in seconds.

Think of this as red-green-refactor on steroids


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Figure 14: Code Review in

Action in Visual Studio

vNext includes integrated

code review support.

This lets team members

provide feedback on new

code, lifting the shared

knowledge of the team. If

desired, code reviews canbe set as a quality gate in

the development process.

This screenshot shows

the source changes

highlighted and comments

from team members

about the changes.

Figure 15: Code Clone Detection reviews a projec t looking for common code blocks that

should be refactored out into a shared block of code.

This detection leverages technology developed in Microsoft Research. The search casts a wide net,

detecting code blocks that have a common structure and approach.

The search is semantic, not just literal. This technique detects both copy and paste errors as well

as code fragments with a common logical structure that contain superficial differences such as changed

variable names.

The end result is a report which lets a team to review common code and decide how to proceed.


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Figure 16: Exploratory Testing The most important bugs are usually found by unanticipated exploration

of the application. Visual Studio exploratory testing keeps a full log of your interaction with the software

under test and allows you snip the log to show only the relevant sequence to illustrates the bug. This can be

combined with screenshots to show the exact problem at that point in the experience.


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Figure 17: Application Issues in Production An issue is observed for a production application and an alert

is raised in System Center.

The operations team can then rapidly work out whether the issue is related to the application

itself or the environment.

Aligning Development with Operations

All successful software projects transition into production use, and modern projects transition

frequently. This is where they are delive ring value to the business. Its at this point, though, that many

of the most difficult issues to reproduce appear. Of ten, the team is told that an issue exists in production but

they cannot reproduce the problem outside of the produc tion environment, much to the frustration of

end users and the operations team.

With Visual Studio vNext, we provide a rich set of integrations which enable an actionable workflowbetween the development and operations teams. The first such scenario was announced at TechEd

allowed operations staff leveraging System Center to pass data to the development team so they could triage

the issues and rapidly find the root cause in the code itself. The demonstrated integration is available as a

Community Technology Preview (CTP) today.

In Visual Studio vNext we will also bring our IntelliTrace infrastructure used for historical debugging

development and test environments into production scenarios to further cement the link between

development and operations.


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Figure 18: Sending the Issue to

the Development Team

Having established that the issue

is at the application layer the

administrator sends the issue to

the development team through

the integrated connection with

Team Foundation Server.

Figure 19: Rich Data for the Developer Following the triage of the issue by the product owner the i ssue ispassed to a member of the development team.

The work item includes rich and actionable data for the developer (environmental data,

stack trace, AVICode telemetry ) letting them rapidly identify the issue and jump direc tly to

the related line of code with a single click!

In Visual Studio vNext we take things a step farther with the ability to attach a full

IntelliTrace log file sourced from the production environment.


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Figure 20: Context Switching with MyWork One of the hardest things for a developer to manage is

interruptions, especially when these mean switching the context of the project and the code at hand.

Context switches are a frequent source of both error and decreased velocit y.

My Work provides a new task-based approach to unify the developers work contexts. When the developer

switches context, for example to fix an urgent bug, Visual Studio automatically packages all the open work with

the prior active task. When the developer recalls the task, work is instantly restored in context and error-free.

Enhanced User Experience

One of the first things you will notice is an improved experience across Visual Studio vNext. We have

focused on simplifying many of the daily tasks team members perform. The goal here is to streamline the

most common tasks and ensure that people love working with the software this is critical to reducing wasted

cycles across the team and illustrates our ongoing commitment to improve the usability of Visual Studio.


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Figure 22: Work Item

Management we have

overhauled the web experience

(built with standard HTML)

for Team Foundation Server

we leverage touch controls

where applicable for natural

interaction.

We have also greatly improved

the performance of Team Web

Access including work item

creation and maintenance.

Figure 21: Team Explorer is the connection to Team Foundation Server included in the V isual Studio

Integrated Development Environment. In vNext the user experience is much improved with full

asynchronous communication leading to vastly accelerated load times. We also include new default views to

highlight the most common information a developer needs e.g. allocated work items, build progress, reports

and bugs. Integrated search helps you find the information you need fast.


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Figure 24: Team Foundation Server

on Windows Azure we have

brought Team Foundation Server

to the Windows Azure Platform

to help any team to be up and

running within 30 seconds.

Figure 23: New Work Item

Dialogue The work item

viewer in Visual Studio

has been significantly

enhanced in vNext.

Work Items can have rich

text and images directly

embedded in the viewto improve the fidelity

of feedback and many

of the standard fields

are pre populated.


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ClosingModern application management solutions need to address the underl ying issues that prevent teams from

reaching their full potential. They must facilit ate:

Collaboration through integration across all roles in the team

Timely and actionable feedback to reduce wasted effort

Leveraging natural and appropriate tools for the task at hand

Transparent and agile best practices to be adopted at will

For the last five years we have been on a journey to create an offering that addresses these issues and

resolves the major sources of waste in the development lifec ycle.

Visual Studio vNext is another major step forward as we extend our coverage of the lifecycle and

embrace additional roles critical to a projec ts success. We have also focused on ensuring the team receives

continuous feedback throughout the lifecycle to encourage rich, productive and scalable interactions which

increase the productivity of the team and reduce risk.

We cant wait to share this with you and your organization we hope you found this whitepaper a

useful way to digest the announcements we made at TechEd and relate the individual features and scenarios

back to a broader set of issues we all face in the creation of software.

The best way to join us on or shared journey is to adopt the foundational technologies in Visual

Studio 2010. If you would like to find out more visit www.microsoft.com/visualstudio today.

Thank you


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Figure 25: Bringing the team Together In Visual Studio vNext we continue down the path of bringing the team

together by creating trustworthy and transparent bridges which improve the flow of information across the

entire team, eliminating the most common causes of waste.


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Visual Studio vNext Preview Web[1]