Top 7 VS 2012 ALM additions

During a technical conversation with one of my colleagues, I have been asked asked about the Top 7 addition to VS 2012 ALM tools from my point of view. I answered as follows:

If we mean ALM tools collectively, not only TFS then, I will say that:

1-SharePoint Testing Support : It is something that came too late but, finally it came to rock.

2-DevOps  tools and techniques : It is a materialization of the Microsoft/Forrrester's Joint study that took place in 2006 (as far as I remember). 70% of Existing IT Budgets in the Fortune 500 Corporation  are spent on maintaining existing systems. Delivering a way to track the quality of systems during their production time became something crucial to have.

3-TFS Service RTM: is a Brilliant offering that will bring new users to the TFS umbrella. Simply it offloads lots of small groups from incurring great amount of Capex budget, and replace it with an affordable Opex budget. Despite the fact of that there is no single clear walk-through that could be provided by the product team to migrate from On Premises solution to the cloud based solution, I expect this service to boom in the next coming years. Moreover, It will open a new opportunity for offshore teams to share their project's artifacts with their primary contractors in a much easier way.

4-The Feedback tool, along with the introduction of Storyboarding tool: It simply bridges the gap between End users, and the product team. In an old study of IBM(late 70s); this gap my cost product team 300+% of the original product cost (Reference:Sarson’s Analysis, and Design Book 1978 edition). The business agility and communication revolution may make this percentage hike up. Storyboarding and Feedback tools could save product teams a hell amount of time, and money that could be lost during the UATs.

5-MTM Enhancements: Despite they are detailed features but i count them important:

• Video Recording Enhancements: It solves lots of storage overflow problems due to video recording sizes.
• Explanatory testing: It provides a better way to implement agile testing technique. Moreover it answer the question that I used to be asked, If we don't have preset Test Cases how can we test using MTM?!
• Testing for Windows Store Applications: It was unexpected to evangelize everywhere for Windows 8 Development while not having an ALM way to make some sort of exploratory and manual testing. It gives a clear message from the ALM team that we are always aligned.

6- Unit testing Enhancements: the new Unit Testing using Fakes Framework: I know that it is a unit testing thing with professional edition but finally it is related to the ALM practices.

• Unit Testing Fakes Framework: I think part of that is related to the Microsoft Research labs efforts during the PEX project which, as far as I know, still running. For years, teams used to use their own fakes framework, or community owned fakes framework. Depending on a Microsoft standard one can streamline unit testing in many good ways. A good scenario that I might recommend Fakes Framework in is the scenario of having a primary contractor that divided a project between him, and one of his partners. They can freely use the same standard framework to makes sure that their unit test can go smoothly based on same unit tests.
• Enhancements happened to the performance of the unit tests.

7- Code Reviews: I consider this tool, a wonderful way for teaming up. Maybe it doesn't have great engineering effort from the product team (which is the same case of storyboarding, and feedback tool) but It is really very helpful towards Bridging Dev/Dev gaps. It materializes a better way for Peer reviewing.

SharePoint 2010 leads the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2010, Microsoftians now in an even stronger position than before

Last September, 3, 2010 Gartner has released the new portals’ market report.

The great news was that SharePoint 2010 Leads the Magic Quadrant of Horizontal Portals; heading in this, IBM WebSphere portal, as well as Oracle Solutions. Microsoft SharePoint is a consideration in more Gartner portal inquiries — over 70% — than any other vendor.

According to Gartner: The portal market continues to consolidate, with most enterprises focusing on a core set of strategic providers. Yet, emerging demands and technology disruptions are raising the bar for value, as well as opening opportunities for new approaches and new entrants.

The Report Summary said:

The field of viable portal vendors has narrowed considerably, dropping from more than 50 vendors in 2003 to fewer than a dozen in 2010. However, the consolidation of traditional portal vendors doesn't necessarily mean the commoditization of the market. In light of pressing business needs to improve the user experience across channels, and amidst the innovations of Web 2.0 and the cloud, making the right portal choice is more important than ever.

The major technology shifts toward Web 2.0, the cloud and business versus the IT influence are galvanizing the portal market. Portals provide a single, personalized point of access to relevant information, processes and people. They appeal to business leaders as a means to improve employee productivity and collaboration, extend business processes and applications to broader audiences, improve business visibility and responsiveness, engage and serve customers, and improve relationships and efficiency among value chain partners. More importantly than ever, portals appeal to end users overwrought with too many systems to log into and too much information. Enterprise portals unify the user experience, and provide relevancy and context across disparate applications. They provide a unified user experience by spanning across on-premises and cloud boundaries, as well as business and social boundaries. IT organizations need them more than ever to pull together and aggregate disparate information, exert control and ensure compliance, and scale their ability to agilely deliver these applications to the business and users.

Looking forward, the horizontal portal market will serve as an important foundation for the emerging user experience platform (UXP). Organizations are focusing on business-level issues, requiring better engagement of users across a widening range of devices and channels, and new vendors are entering the market with alternative approaches to accomplishing the portal proposition. As portals, user interfaces, and user interaction technologies and practices have proliferated, they have evolved into disconnected stovepipes. Portal products, mashup tools, rich Internet application (RIA) tools, Ajax solutions, Web content management and mobile application development tools all target their respective platforms effectively, but they require enterprise developers to create separate user interaction models and code bases — with few, if any, cross-platform capabilities. Vendors have started to address enterprise concerns with the convergence of these related technologies. The UXP provides integration of technologies used to deliver portals, mashups, RIAs, Ajax-enabled websites, Web content management and mobile applications. This integration can take the form of a set of separate, yet integrated, products (that may or may not be delivered as a suite) or a single product. Early examples of the UXP are largely derived from portal technology, and include Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle WebCenter along with Universal Content Management (UCM), and IBM's broadening WebSphere Portal with its related collaboration and content management portfolio, which is developing toward a more cohesive user experience platform.

The importance of portals and the future of UXP are not lost on vendors; enterprise vendors are using portals to promote their most-sweeping and most-critical agendas. Many of the vendors are using the portal to promote a far broader and deeper agenda, whether it's their developer platforms and tools, content management capabilities, databases and middleware, or enterprise applications. As an inherently cloud-friendly aspect of middleware, portals are also a fundamental vehicle for transitioning customers to the cloud. The portal choice is, therefore, critical to ensure that organizations can accomplish their business goals, while ensuring vendor independence and agility.

Organizations tend to make portal decisions based on a wide range of factors, including functionality, familiarity, price, interoperability, usability, momentum among customers and the IT ecosystem at large. As portals have evolved, basic portal functions, such as user management, personalization, content management and integration, have been extended and enhanced, and new capabilities, such as social computing, analytics and business process management, have been added to respond to subsequent customer demands.

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