- Posted by christhi on December 1, 2008
In the coming months I will be blogging about how one can incorporate ALM or Application Lifecycle Management practices to world of User Experience design and development. Until now there really has not been a windfall of material on this topic so I thought I would address it a bit given the fact I just spent the past year completely focused in this world. I will also be speaking about it at Mix 2009 in Vegas alongside Chris Bernard so I hope you will join us (http://2009.visitmix.com) in person or online.
ALM means different things to different people so I will be addressing UX and ALM from several angles, from human process implementation to workflow to its manifestations in tooling. ALM's benefits are just becoming clear as the tools mature alongside that of software engineering practices. With UX becoming so important in software development we have now reached an empass where we must also include those processes specfically geared towards producing better user experiences into the overall lifecycle. Afterall, UX is as important as implementing and testing the software itself.
For my first passage in this series, I am briefly introducing a solution to one of the reasons ALM has not been as accessible in the UX world: change management or at its most basic level source control. Although Visual Studio and its IDE extensions have allowed almost any third party source control software to play nicely in the interface what has been missing is source control for Microsoft's UX tools. Not until Expression version 3.0 will source control extensions be added to Expression Studio and thus the general concensus has been to either only use Visual Studio or use something like the Team Foundation Server Explorer as a stand alone tool to get your SilverLight solutions into the source control repository. SilverLight and WPF designers and developers had to first launch TFS explorer or go to VStudio if they wanted to check-in any source or do any form of "work item management" or "task/bug management". Well I have good news! Now with the updated release of the TFS 2008 Power Tools for October you can now get source control and work item access straight from Expression Studio. In fact any common dialog provides the context menu to do so! The new power tool provides a windows shell extension that will allow to you check-in/check-out and even manage work items right from common dialogs and ergo right from Expression Blend itself for example.
To download the power tools simply go to: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/tfs2008/bb980963.aspx - NOTE: make sure and select custom install and select the shell extension otherwise it won't get installed and you won't see the following context menu from Expression Studio. Enjoy. Later I will go into more detail on how this can be leveraged in your day to day UX design and development activities. UX can now take a front seat in the world of ALM!!
