The Best of ALM Books

Technology continues to change at a dizzying pace. While that is of course true, it's also practically a cliché. What also changes, and indeed more significantly, are the development practices that go along with those technological advancements. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), agile, DevOps—those have all evolved along the way as well. ALM has been around long enough so there are some venerable references, should you feel the need to beef up your collection of ALM books. If you're thinking of adding a few titles to your development bookshelf, here’s a look at a few ALM books you might want to consider.

Agile Application Lifecycle Management: Using DevOps to Drive Process Improvement

This polished, practical and comprehensive title focuses on agile ALM, encompassing all the essential principles of agile development. The book provides practical advice and strategies for carefully and thoughtfully implementing agile ALM. Examples and guidance in the book show how to fully leverage the benefits of agile without sacrificing any aspects of your current development processes.

You'll learn how to properly manage source code, builds, environments, change control, and releases—all within the structure of agile ALM. You'll also learn how to support agile development within a variety of different organizational structures, whether those groups use traditional development practices, conventional ALM systems, or even non-Agile teams. The book will also guide you through the process of scaling Agile ALM to accommodate larger teams or even remote teams.

Agile Application Lifecycle Management: Using DevOps to Drive Process Improvement includes sections on:

• Understanding key concepts underlying modern application and system lifecycles
• Creating your best processes for developing your most complex software and systems
• Automating build engineering, continuous integration, and continuous delivery/deployment
• Enforcing Agile ALM controls without compromising productivity
• Creating effective IT operations that align with Agile ALM processes
• Gaining more value from testing and retrospectives
• Making ALM work in the cloud, and across the enterprise
• Preparing for the future of Agile ALM

Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2013

While slightly dated and geared toward Visual Studio 2013, this remains a comprehensive and high-level text. Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2013 provides in-depth coverage and a complete framework for using Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) to streamline software design and deployment processes with Visual Studio. Naturally, the focus is on using Microsoft's well-developed tools and methodologies.

This book fully describes how to use the Microsoft ALM suite of productivity tools with Visual Studio 2013 in a variety of situations and applications. Extensive case studies demonstrate how to apply the development practices described in the book. The hands-on approach the veteran team of authors takes makes adopting Visual Studio's ALM functionality relatively simple. Coverage areas in this high-level text include:

• streamlined software design and deployment
• practical overview of ALM with step-by-step guides and reference material
• case studies to illustrate specific functionality and provide in-depth instruction
• iOS, MacOS, Android and Java development
• modeling, designing, and coordinating enterprise software deployments

Hopefully, the authors and Microsoft see enough promise in the subject matter to produce a new edition to cover Visual Studio 2017.

Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio ALM 2015

This book takes ALM a step further and focuses on continuous delivery; specifically Continuous Delivery practices using Visual Studio and TFS 2015. The authors Mathias Olausson and Jakob Ehn are both Microsoft MVPs. They adroitly present the theories behind this methodology and how to best use it in practical environments using real-world examples.

Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio ALM 2015 fully describes the agile and iterative techniques you need to know if you're planning to accelerate your development practices. This is what you need to know if you're going to deliver solid, working software with every release. And this direction is well worth considering. Continuous delivery can help you reduce risk and become more agile and innovative. Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio ALM 2015 delivers:

• A full definition and description of Continuous Delivery practice, and how to use them to more efficiently develop better apps with Visual Studio 2015
• How to use Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online to plan, design, and implement powerful and reliable deployment pipelines
• Detailed step-by-step instructions for implementing Continuous Delivery on real projects

Stay tuned for future blog posts featuring TFS and VSTS books! Know of any more great ALM books? Drop me a line at [email protected].

Posted by Lafe Low on 04/12/2017