Application Lifecycle Management in Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Last night I presented at the New York SharePoint User Group on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) in Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010. Some of my thoughts from the feedback in the audience: It was a mixed crowd of approximately 50 people, of which 10 were developers, 5-10 were IT Pros and the rest were a mix of Business Users and general SharePoint enthusiasts. All developers were using Solution Packages. Not all the developers were using source control, which disappointed me because anything you do in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 needs to be version controlled especially if the application makes it into Production environments! None were using Team Foundation Server, mostly due to the complexities of the installation and were using SVN mostly as it was free. Only one was using a Build Server to create Solution Packages automatically from source control. None of the developers were doing automated unit testing due to the complexities of the SharePoint object model. None of the developers were conducting automated integration testing due to the complexities of setting up an environment replicating Production. None of the developers were doing automated web testing or load testing mainly due to the fact they weren’t aware of the tools available in Visual Studio 2010. Of the 20 odd people in the room using SharePoint Designer 2010, all of them were doing the work directly in Production environments because it was too hard to promote changes through from Development to Test to Production. I will be presenting this again at SharePoint Saturday Philadelphia this weekend, and will be interested to see whether the consensus is the same there as well. ​

The slide deck is available on SlideShare for you to view. Here is the abstract: Jeremy Thake, Enterprise Architect at AvePoint and SharePoint MVP, will explain the principles of Application Lifecycle Management in SharePoint 2010. The session will suit SharePoint Developers, Team Leaders, Architects and Development Managers to understand how to approach ALM with SharePoint. The pillars of ALM will be discussed in detail and the benefits of each from a Solution perspective. The ALM maturity model will be presented to allow you to evaluate where you are in your own internal processes and how to mature these further. The NothingButSharePoint.com Project ALM approach will be discussed in detail as a case study, which involves global distributed development teams and designers. The pros and cons of this approach will be compared to the others. Common problems with promoting from Dev to Staging to Production will be discussed in detail. From this session you should walk away with: · An understanding of what application lifecycle management is · An understanding of the approaches to ALM with SharePoint Development · An understanding of how to get started with baby steps as a SharePoint Developer, Team Leader or Solution Architect Have thoughts around ALM and won’t be able to make it out to Philly? Drop me a comment here or find me on Twitter (@jthake).