Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Exam 70-498 - Delivering Continuous Value with Visual Studio 2012 Application Lifecycle Management

I recently completed the ALM exam. This was my first Microsoft exam and I was apprehensive about doing it. I passed (Yay!) and decided to follow Niel’s example and write down what I think would help preparing for and completing it successfully.

I think the starting point and source of ALM is the Agile Manifesto and principles behind it. This is at the heart of ALM and this exam, and can be referred to with almost every question.

The next valuable resource is the scrum guide. A substantial part of the exam is about scrum in TFS so know and understand it. Reading “Professional Scrum Development with Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2012” by Richard Hundhausen. This is a fabulous resource on scrum with TFS and would get most developers excited about the prospect of working in a high functioning scrum team.

Then last, but not least go to Microsoft Virtual Academy and work through their Applying ALM with Visual Studio. Watch the videos and do the questions at the end.

Use TFS! Set up a few projects, play with it and familiarise yourself with the templates.

When you sit for the exam make sure you read the questions properly. There are several that you can pass by process of elimination. Watch out for small clues like backlog item vs. requirement vs. stories.

Good luck with your exam!

Friday, November 29, 2013

ALM days : save the date…

ALM days logoALM days Cape Town is happening on 23 January 2014!

Team Foundation Consulting will be launching ALM days in Cape Town on 23rd January 2014!

Learn about updates to Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management offerings which will enable your software development teams to be more productive and to collaborate more effectively. This event provides insight, advice, strategies and techniques to improve quality and ensure the final application meets the needs and expectations of users.

Reserve your seat today!

Find out more at www.alm-days.co.za

The event is free and seats are limited.

Join us for an awesome day of ALM!

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Launching…ALM days 2014 South Africa!

Finally, the time has come for us to launch the first ALM days in South Africa.

Team Foundation Consulting will be launching ALM days in Cape Town in January 2014!

Learn about updates to Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management offerings which will enable your software development teams to be more productive and to collaborate more effectively.

This event provides insight, advice, strategies and techniques to improve quality and ensure the final application meets the needs and expectations of users.

The event is free and seats are limited.
Date, venue and agenda to be confirmed soon.

Cape Town Event

If you are interested, sign up on www.alm-days.co.za and be first to be notified once all the details have been finalised.

We look forward to you joining us for a day focussed on Application Lifecycle Management.

Learn – Discuss – Question – Engage

Meet new & interesting people…

Monday, November 4, 2013

Introducing the Visual Studio ALM Rangers – Niel Zeeman

I have been an avid consumer of the ALM Rangers artifacts, articles and applications for a long time now.

Who are the Rangers:

“The Visual Studio ALM Rangers accelerate the adoption of Visual Studio with out-of-band solutions for feature gaps and value-add guidance for the ALM community.”

Some of the cool “stuff” that you should have seen before:

  • planning and upgrade guidance
  • branching and merging
  • and recently their DevOps tooling and guidance

    And finally I will be on the other side of the fence Smile

  • Monday, September 23, 2013

    What happened to the TFS 2013 Build Templates?

    I have had a couple people asking me “where are the build templates in TFS 2013?”.

    Well they have been removed!
    Don’t worry, they are still available though Smile

    By default, they are now simply stored in TFS and not in the repository.

    When creating a build definition you will notice that the default build templates can simply be selected (as per usual).

    image

    When you need to use a custom template, or modify the existing templates you can simple download the template,

    image

    make your changes and then upload the updated build template to the repository as per normal.

    image

    Microsoft has reworked things in the build templates, simplifying it quite a lot. Hopefully altering your build processes will no longer be such a daunting task!

    Tuesday, September 10, 2013

    Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2013 RC Released

    Some big news!! The release candidate for VS & TFS 2013 was released last night.

    There are a couple of really nice features added since the preview. One of my favourites is the charting ability for work items. I have done quite a few custom TFS reports, and even though this may reduce the number of jobs that I have, it is VERY cool nonetheless…

    The list of things that have been added is fairly large, hopefully I will blog about it in the future.

    Note that this does have a “go-live” license, so Microsoft will provide support if you decide to be an early adopter and upgrade your production environments.

    Feel free to contact us if you need more information around upgrade options...