It was not until recently that I was introduced to the term ALM. Application Lifecycle management. No idea when this Three Letter Abbreviation was invented but the problem it describes are much older, and familiar to a lot of Dynamics NAV developers.
About three years ago I wrote this article, that caused quite some stirr in the NAV Channel, unintended, but typical for our community I think.
So what is the problem definition.
Keeping track of Development History. Why did What happen and When.
After writing the article I dropped the subject. We started the Partner Ready Software initiative and ALM is/was not part of our initial primairy focus. When presenting our vision on Dynamics NAV development I use these slides:
What we tried…
What we need…
And from a pure software quality concept this is true.
But that does not take away the fact that ALM is quite cool too. And a recent development caught my attention that might be of interest to all Dynamics Partners, but especially the smaller ones or the ones who still do customer based development.
Until recently TFS had to be installed on premisse and it is “something to maintain” for IT guys.
When Waldo and I were in Redmond (WA) last year for MVP Summit I went to a session about ALM where Visual Studio Online was presented, as Luc van Vugt also mentions in one of his posts.
On first thoughts you might think this allows you to code C# in the cloud, and yes, you can do that if you want. But a better naming would be TFS Online since it allows a Team Foundation Server to run in the Cloud for free without any hassle or cost. How cool is that!
This is definately something that brings ALM back into my area’s of interest and I have already spent some time exploring it.
You can setup different projects in the tool and it allows you to define work items and sprints to work scrum. You can define team members and do planning and even do visual kanban planning. Really super cool!
The first downside I found is that it is still required to use an on site tool to check in and check out objects. You can use Team Exporer which is free.
PowerShell
But TFS also allows you to use PowerShell to check in and check out objects which means it can be integrated with existing Dynamics NAV PowerShell scripts. This would be very interesting to NAV Partners and we won’t need all these third party tools to integrate.
GIT & Microsft Dynamics NAV
Another concept that I stumbled on while exploring VSO is GIT. I am not quite sure yet how to combine these two concepts in NAV but the way I look at it is that GIT helps while doing development and work is still unfinished, and when you check in objects in TFS they are ready to be tested.
TFS is integrated with GIT and I am going to spend some time investigating what the options are and how they can work together.
