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 led 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 WebUI Test Studio (Automated Testing), JustCode (Code Analysis and Refactoring), JustMock (Mocking) to name a few.
We'd love to hear what you think of our approach to ALM. Share your thoughts and stay up to date on our ALM journey at our TeamPulse blog.
Joel Semeniuk, Executive VP, Team Productivity Division
Microsoft Regional Director
Microsoft MVP, ALM
