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ALM takes root at Microsoft


By David Worthington
November 1, 2008 — 
The next version of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) will dive deeply into application life-cycle management, shaking up the terrain occupied by more-established ALM tool producers, and could pull model-driven architecture (MDA) into the mainstream of Windows application development, observers say.

Microsoft partners, meanwhile, are heralding the plans for VSTS 2010 as an affirmation of ALM’s significance and the validity of their own offerings, though for some the nod could be a double-edged sword. The software giant has traditionally relied on third parties to seed the Visual Studio ecosystem with ALM capabilities. VSTS 2010’s built-in accommodations for ALM could threaten some partners’ tools, said Gartner research vice president Jim Duggan.
 
Tracy Ragan, COO of build management software vendor OpenMake, downplayed that concern. Microsoft is still focusing on its particular audience, she said, and “we are even more granular than that.” She said partners would have opportunities to support cross-language environments or to create solutions that work with legacy versions of Visual Studio that Microsoft no longer targets.
 
“Microsoft isn’t doing anything more than the open-source community is doing around Eclipse,” Ragan said.
 
At Seapine Software, which develops defect- and issue-tracking tools, senior product manager Jeff Amfahr said VSTS 2010 “helps validate the message that we’ve been talking about for a while, namely that the whole ALM life cycle is important and needs to be included. Since one of our key values is cross-platform ALM support, we don’t necessarily view [Microsoft’s move] as a problem.”
 
Amfahr added, however, that partners that focus exclusively on Windows in the enterprise “should be concerned.”

In response, Joe Marini, director of the Developer Tools Ecosystem at Microsoft, said the company has a rich and vital partner ecosystem around VSTS today and will maintain that in VSTS 2010. He added that Microsoft customers rely on its partners to help solve business problems across heterogeneous environments and that Microsoft recognizes their importance to customers

“This is why we include our partners early in the product development cycle so they can see our direction and plan accordingly,” he said.
 
While Microsoft has not committed to a ship date, VSTS 2010 (formerly "Rosario") is acknowledged as a major release and will coincide with the introduction of .NET Framework 4.0. Much of the VSTS feature set revolves around the use of constraint-based modeling; other changes are better source code management and new facilities for continuous testing, as well as for greater collaboration between developers and QA professionals.

MDA spoken here
A Microsoft-created modeling language tentatively called “M” provides VSTS’ core MDA capabilities. The language offers both textual and visual views for creating models, and its declarative specifications become part of the application, said Microsoft corporate vice president Robert Wahbe. Modeling enables continuous integration, with code validated against the architecture before it is checked in.

Visual Studio will offer multiple domain-specific views of models and will map physical architecture to assets. The combination of pictures and text will make it easier to share models, said Wahbe, adding that Visual Studio will integrate with a visual modeling tool now under development.

Most significantly, M, an XML-based abstraction, is designed for interoperability, with translation to lower-level modeling languages such as Business Process Execution Language and Unified Modeling Language. Microsoft intends to standardize the new language, he noted, without specifying how that would be done.

Microsoft’s embrace of UML will help the industry move past the paralyzing “UML/MDA vs. DSL [domain-specific language]” debates of the past five years, said Jeffrey Hammond, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. Microsoft joined the Object Management Group, which oversees the UML standard, in September.

“Microsoft’s greater embrace of existing standards is good news for developers in general,” said Andrew Binstock, principal analyst at Pacific Data Works and an SD Times columnist. “Microsoft has become more pragmatic in terms of the enterprise and is well aware of the actual processes that enterprises are adopting, and it’s moving to the forefront of that.”
 
From a .NET developer’s perspective, Chris Menegay, a principal consultant for Notion Solutions and Microsoft regional director (recognized by Microsoft’s Developer Platform evangelism group for technical expertise), said developers had primarily asked for “very nice tools” that would support UML. “Microsoft missed the mark badly with the Team System Architect Edition in 2005/2008,” he said.

Menegay explained that the VSTS 2005/2008 modeling tools were focused on distributed systems, which was handy for applications with many Web services but of little value for the typical desktop Web applications that most developers build today. VSTS 2010 will help developers design applications in a more useful way for the broadest base of customers, he said.

Gartner’s Duggan said VSTS 2010 will let customers “stay on Microsoft ground; previously, they have had to go to tools from companies such as Borland or IBM to handle UML modeling."

Modeling is a foundational technology of Microsoft’s Oslo initiative, a multiyear, multiproduct effort to help customers build, deploy, design and manage composite applications through MDA.

Source-code management will figure heavily into the 2010 release. Its Architecture Explorer will deliver new source control features, including branch visualization, which is designed to help developers understand complicated, deep branches and merge them back together.

“That is a big deal for parallel development and for enterprise shops,” said Duggan. “[Branch visualization] continues the evolution of functions from ‘kitchen table’ scale into something that is really competitive with [IBM] ClearCase and Serena Dimensions. They are not there yet, but this gets them closer.”

The feature is most useful for teams that need to maintain multiple releases in parallel for their customers, said Forrester’s Hammond.

Notion Solutions’ Menegay said the addition of branch visualization would make it easier for his consultancy to migrate customers away from ClearCase. He believes the feature is being added for competitive reasons.

Binstock said VSTS 2010 is indeed a shot across IBM’s bow. “It is clear that [Microsoft] is targeting the Rational folks. They have a pretty compelling story, to be honest; Rational is a ‘heavy’ product in the enterprise sense of the term. If Visual Studio can deliver the same functionality without imposing heavy overhead on users, Microsoft will do quite well in the [ALM] space.”

Microsoft is also introducing tools to help organizations develop and test database changes the same way they handle source code, said Menegay. Its database professional role and team developer role products, VSTS 2008 Database Edition and VSTS 2008 Development Edition, have been pulled together into a unified product.

“It’s something that customers have been wanting for years, but it was just hard,” he said. “With the tools Microsoft is building, it makes [such testing] possible now, but it is not without some challenges.”

Gartner’s Duggan said unifying the products might have been more of a marketing decision and less about ALM. The database edition had targeted SQL, and there was not enough differentiation to justify the split packaging, he said. “Adding it to the developer edition effectively is a price reduction or increase in value for many users, and should help drive the pace of upgrades.”

‘TiVo for testers’
Microsoft is also appealing to the ALM set with new test tools that record the state of a running .NET application, all of the appropriate logs, and the debugging of the application through a suite of agents and collectors that it refers to as “TiVo for testers.” The information is hooked into defect tracking and can be handed off to QA professionals so they can reproduce and verify defects.

“Testers have traditionally been separated from developers by both organization and tools,” said Hammond. That model grows ineffective as teams transition to agile development practices, he said, adding that the storage of information in separate repositories compounds the problem. Tighter integration makes it easier for developers and testers to work together in tight-cycle iterations, Hammond said.

"This is huge,” Menegay wrote. He explained that Microsoft has already made some headway by getting both groups onto a common tool platform with today’s VSTS, but now they will “actually have good testing tools” to work with.

“I’ve been playing with the CTPs [Community Technology Previews], and the tools are looking very, very slick,” Menegay commented.

There is a glaring void, however: Java applications are not instrumented. Microsoft says customers should purchase third-party tools to test heterogeneous applications.

Microsoft is missing an opportunity as an ALM player by leaving it up to partners to integrate Team Foundation Server with Eclipse, said Hammond. “They force large enterprises that have both .NET and Java into multiple tool stacks. That may be okay for practitioner tools, but it is not okay for ALM.”

Menegay said he had mixed opinions about VSTS’ lack of Java support. “As big as Microsoft is, they do have finite resources. I would prefer that they spend that effort making .NET and SQL Server be light years better than Java,” he said, adding that a key request from people like himself is that Microsoft build its tools in such a way that the API allows for third parties to fill in the gaps.

Microsoft says it is committed to addressing its customers’ concerns. VSTS 2010 thus addresses the cost of defects by pulling testing into the software development life cycle earlier with a new impact analysis feature that interrogates source code and assigns test suites to code before it is checked in. VSTS 2010 will also include test-planning tools that capture manual tests.

“Traceability and reuse of test assets help productivity and quality,” said Gartner’s Duggan. But he added a caveat: “VSTS doesn’t force developers to behave well, but [it] reduces the penalty they incur if they do not behave well.”

Team Foundation Server can be configured to preclude a developer’s checking in code unless certain conditions, such as creating test scripts or running unit tests, have been met.

“Different organizations will emphasize different types of testing,” noted Menegay. He predicted an increased emphasis on the frequency of unit testing as more organizations pay attention to quality.

QA professionals will be empowered by such VSTS capabilities as a “recorder” feature that verifies whether a tester has followed a test case correctly. “QA people writing automated [noncoded] tests in VSTS 2010 will help their team as well as the development team,” Menegay observed.

With greater emphasis on software quality and new technology to break down the walls between ALM roles, Microsoft is putting heft behind its ALM efforts. But its acute reluctance to embrace Java may hamper its success.

“The emergence of Microsoft as a serious player in the ALM market will have the immediate effect of giving users more options and pressuring the two major ALM vendors: Rational [IBM] and Borland,” Binstock commented. “The effect on both customers and competitors, however, will be limited by the fact that the Microsoft tools support only .NET languages.”


Related Search Term(s): ALM, Java, .NET, Visual Studio, XML, IBM, Microsoft


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