What's New for Application Lifecycle Management in Visual Studio 2012

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You can use Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) to manage your product lifecycle, reduce risks, and improve efficiencies. When you install or upgrade to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012, you and your team can benefit from the new features and supported tasks outlined in the following table.

Lifecycle area

New features and supported tasks

Planning and Tracking

  • Create and manage the product backlog, sprints, and tasks.

  • Run daily standups with a task board.

  • Support multiple teams within a team project.

  • Engage stakeholders to provide feedback about pre-release software.

  • Illustrate requirements with PowerPoint Storyboarding and link storyboards to work items.

  • Manage enterprise project portfolios and access up-to-date project status and resource availability using Microsoft Project Professional and Project Server.

Architecture, Modeling, and Design

  • Create, read, and edit dependency graphs faster and more easily.

  • Get more information about your work by opening and viewing linked model elements in work items.

  • Communicate with others about the design by creating UML class diagrams from C# code.

  • Implement your design more quickly by generating C# code from UML class diagrams.

  • Import UML class, use case, and sequence diagram elements from XMI 2.1 files.

Developer Tools

  • Work more efficiently by organizing work and reducing the impact of interruptions using My Work and Pending Changes.

  • Enhance transparency and collaborate more effectively to product quality code using Code Review.

  • Integrate testing into the developer workflow using Test Explorer.

  • Find duplicated code in a solution with Code Clone Analysis.

  • Collect diagnostic data for applications running on computers that don't have Visual Studio by using the IntelliTrace standalone data collector.

  • Review Web requests in IntelliTrace recordings for ASP.NET Web applications hosted on IIS 7.0 or later.

  • Easily debug code generated from text templates. Quickly customize the code generator by writing Visual Studio extensions.

Testing

  • Conduct exploratory test sessions.

  • Locate, view, and edit your test methods, UI actions and their associated controls in the UI control map.

  • Quickly track your test plan progress using the Results tab in Microsoft Test Manager.

  • Clone your test plan to work on different releases in parallel.

  • Test Windows Store apps running on a remote device using manual tests or exploratory test sessions.

  • Install and configure agents more easily for Lab Management for Visual Studio 2012.

  • Include SCVMM 2012 and clustered Hyper-V hosts in Lab Management for Visual Studio 2012.

Team Foundation Build

  • Define and run automated build processes in a hosted deployment of TFS by connecting it to an on-premises or hosted build controller.

  • Increase the efficiency of your gated check-in build process by configuring it to build multiple check-ins at the same time.

  • Run native and third-party framework unit tests using Visual Studio Test Runner or RunTests in a custom build process.

  • Easily access, organize, and get information about the builds that matter most to you using the Builds page in Team Explorer.

  • Debug builds more easily.

Version Control

  • Work in local workspaces either in or outside of Visual Studio, even when you're not connected to Team Foundation Server.

  • Manage your work, reduce the impact of interruptions, and facilitate collaboration with your team with My Work and Pending Changes pages in Team Explorer.

  • Conduct and track reviews of active, suspended, or checked-in code.

  • Manage shelvesets and changesets using My Work and Pending Changes.

  • Review and modify code changes more easily using the enhanced Diff window.

For additional information, see one of the following resources:

See Also

Concepts

What's New in Visual Studio 2012

Installing Team Foundation Server

Adopting Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server for Application Lifecycle Management

Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server