Agile development is a goal that almost every development team shoots for these days. The more efficiently a team can deliver a product, the faster customers can gain access to it—and the faster the organization can generate revenue. But Agile development doesn’t just mean developers coding things faster. Every link along the delivery chain has to be fast. This includes rapid, on-demand provisioning of test environments for unit, check-in, functional, stress, and performance tests. It also includes the ability to quickly and easily deploy application and test bits to these environments on demand.
Many Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) products are being upgraded—and even designed from scratch—to support the Agile development and delivery model. One popular tool is Microsoft Team Foundation Server (MS-TFS). Along with Visual Studio, MS-TFS provides the core set of tools and processes for developing a variety of applications across a number of development platforms offered by Microsoft. These development platforms range from the simplest .NET application to the most complex enterprise applications using platforms like SharePoint and SQL Server.
Cloud platforms are also aiming to enable Agile development. However, the prevailing perception in the cloud ecosystem is to view cloud providers as operating at either a pure infrastructure layer or at a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) layer. On one hand, development and test teams prefer not to deal with pure infrastructure. On the other hand, PaaS offerings force them to conform to specific programming platforms and processes. There is a need to bring together the best of both worlds—the scale, elasticity, and on-demand nature of cloud infrastructure with the development tools and processes used by development and test teams today. This will enable teams to realize the benefits of cloud computing without having to concern themselves with the infrastructure itself. Ultimately, such a solution could help them achieve agility along the development lifecycle that they don’t have today.
In pursuit of this goal, we recently announced the Skytap Automation Pack for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server—an innovative product that provides the integration between VS-TFS and Skytap Cloud. This integration enables development and test teams to utilize the same skills, workflows, and processes they already use with MS-TFS, while reaping the benefits that Skytap Cloud provides—provisioning complex environments, fast on-demand provisioning of dynamic workloads, and support for hybrid cloud architectures.
Learn more about what you can do with the Skytap Automation Pack for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.
Read the full product announcement: Skytap Cloud Integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012.
