Some of us tend to kick off the New Year with new goals, perhaps even professional goals. If you haven't thought of your 2014 goals yet, we might be able to help. The list below summarizes the top 15 Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) goals from the customers we worked with in 2013. Hopefully, it will help you narrow down YOUR top 3 priorities for 2014.
Please share! By participating to the survey, you will be eligible to win a prize! But first, let's start with the main ALM trends in 2014.
Main ALM trends for 2014
As the ALM experts for .NET development organizations, we make it our business to understand what are the next ALM practices and solutions that could positively impact our customers' performance. We have selected 4 main trends:
- Hybrid ALM - Cloud and on-premise.
You can gain more flexibility and more independence in terms of infrastructure with the Cloud. Microsoft heavily invested in Windows Azure as an IaaS (infrastructure as a service) for dev, test, Ops and Visual Studio Online this year. Development teams should definitely look into these solutions to accelerate their release cycle, decrease infrastructure costs and gain more business agility. This is why InCycle is a Windows Azure Circle Partner: to help you take advantage of the Cloud for your ALM strategy.
- Release Management.
Who does not know that InRelease has been acquired by Microsoft yet?! Of course, Release Management has become a number one priority for many companies. Releasing manually creates bottlenecks in the ALM process which could be simply erased by automating deployments and streamlining the release process with release management for Visual Studio.
- DevOps.
DevOps is more than Release Management. DevOps is based on improving communication and practices between Development, Quality and Operations to make releases faster, simple, robust and repeatable. DevOps also includes continuous feedback from customers and from your applications in real-time. Organizations taking advantage of this practice not only make a difference with the rest of their market but also increase customer satisfaction. Getting feedback in real-time is possible with Visual Studio. Check out Visual Studio online (Analytics insight in preview) or PreEmptive Analytics workbench for TFS.
- Enterprise Business Agility.
Taking Agile to the next level is a big trend for 2014. The goal of scaling agile is to synchronize vision, planning, interdependencies, across an organization and delivery teams. This principle has been brought forward by the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), a model for enterprise agility. InCycle is a SAFe Bronze Partner and offers training and services with Visual Studio. To learn more why scaling agile, read this introduction article.
If you have questions about any of these trends, please share your comments below or do not hesitate to contact us.
What are your priorities this year?
Your feedback is important to us! Let us know what you believe will be your priorities this year and you may win a $1,000 consulting services value certificate to use in 2014. Just a simple way to help you achieve your goals for 2014! Contact information is not mandatory but for those who want to share, they will be eligible to win the prize. Results will be unveiled in February.
