Agile, ALM, and Telerik Tools

I don’t think that there is any disagreement that agile methods, stemming from the Agile Manifesto, have changed the way we build software and have lead to profoundly greater successful projects and balanced teams. Agile methods help teams and business bring into focus what is valuable and helps reduce waste by embracing high bandwidth team collaboration, continuous feedback processes, and ever evolving and emergent requirements and designs.

A term you are going to see more and more of is “Application Lifecycle Management” (ALM). In fact, Microsoft has rebranded its entire Visual Studio Team System division to be Microsoft ALM. What is ALM anyway? ALM isn’t a Microsoft technology, it’s a reference to the collection of all practices and tools that go into software development, from an idea all the way through development to retirement. I continually get asked if ALM is agile. The short answer to that is “it can be!” Agile refers to the way teams perform different aspects of ALM. For example, Requirements Management is category of ALM practices as well as Planning and Software Design, each of which can be done using agile principles.

Telerik’s TeamPulse is just one of our ALM tools, along with WebUITest Studio (Automated Testing), JustCode (Code Analysis and Refactoring), JustMock (Mocking) to name a few. Our upcoming Q3 2010 release of TeamPulse helps to extend the breadth and depth of ALM practices we support by adding the ability to capture free form ideas, decompose those ideas into user stories, and finally synchronize those user stories and associated tasks with Team Foundation Server work items.

Make sure to check out the Q3 2010 release of TeamPulse and all of our ALM tools to see how Telerik can bring agility to your application’s lifecycle.

“This is how Imaginet defines ALM, which is one of the best descriptions we’ve found to date”

Joel Semeniuk

Microsoft Regional Director, MVP Microsoft ALM, and
Executive VP of Agile Project Management at Telerik

@JoelSemeniuk