Building a Release Pipeline with Team Foundation Server 2012
Last week Microsoft Patterns & Practices released a new guide about release management using TFS 2012. I had the opportunity to read the guide during development and it has both great guidance, hands-on labs and concrete tooling to support the process. I personally really liked the section on getting good feedback, where the authors shares some good examples on how to use TFS to understand and optimize cycle times in the release process. I definitely recommend taking a look at this guide if you in any way are involved in the software release process.
From the guide:
“The goal of this guidance is to put you on the road toward continuous delivery. By continuous delivery, we mean that through techniques such as versioning, continuous integration, automation, and environment management, you will be able to decrease the time between when you first have an idea and when that idea is realized as software that’s in production. Any software that has successfully gone through your release process will be software that is production ready, and you can give it to customers whenever your business demands dictate. We also hope to show that there are practical business reasons that justify every improvement you want to make. A better release process makes economic sense by providing:
- Faster time to market
- Better quality software
- More productive employees
Follow the team at Trey Research as they refine their processes and move from a mostly manual pipeline to one that’s mostly automated.”
Start reading the guide here.