Bringing Agile into SharePoint - ALM

SharePoint development platform, provides the capabilities to develop, deploy, and update customizations and custom functionalities for the SharePoint sites. The activities that take advantage of these capabilities all fall under the category of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

“ALM is a continuous process of managing the life of an application through governance, development and maintenance.”

With the options like BCS, Client OM, Sandbox solutions, WCF based Service Applications and Claims based authentication SharePoint has also significantly evolved as application development platform which opens up a number of extensibility options for the developers. With the power and flexibility to use these tools and customizations the question arises is how to effectively and efficiently manage the activities taking into account the lifecycle of application starting from requirement gathering to release management with consistent quality.

The entire process involves setting up SharePoint with visual studio, TFS, Build automation, Deployment and automated testing.

Setting up DEV environment

To take the full advantage of development capabilities, SharePoint is installed on all development machines. We use scripted installation of SharePoint (SPAutoInsaller) which helps to maintain a similar environment for all development machines and helps the team to configure SharePoint easily.

TFS as a source control

With Visual studio as a development tool, the integration to source control is much easier as the IDE is easily integrated to the TFS. The team creates and works on team projects, checks in the code directly from Visual Studio to TFS.

TFS for build automation

CI builds are configured to ensure that every code that is checked in passes the build with the configured build standards. On every code check-in the build server to pull down the latest source code, compile the code, run any static analysis rules, executes all unit tests and integration tests on the latest code and report any errors along the way. This is a great way of ensuring that even if the developers locally don’t run the static analysis rules or unit tests they will be run here and also ensures that all source code is checked in and is working as expected.

 

 

TFS for Code analysis

Code analysis rules help teams to ensure that coding is done according to the standards defined and are followed without fail. The default set of rules are built into Visual Studio which can also be tweaked to meet the specific needs of the teams. Apart from the built in rules which are common to all projects, additional rules like SPDisposeCheck that analyzes the code to see whether all SPWeb and SPSite objects are disposed correctly can be added to the rules. These rules are run on both Visual Studio and TFS to ensure continuous quality.

Automated deployment

Automated deployment is triggered as part of the build process, or as an unattended service to deploy solution packages. The deployment process is a combination of batch files, PowerShell commands and xml configuration files. It is a great way to update the test machines with latest version of the software every time a new version is checked in.

Automated unit, smoke and regression testing

Testing is also configured as part of the CI build process or a nightly build process depending on the teams requirements. Most of the unit tests are executed on every check-in build and regression tests are executed as part of the nightly builds. Team focuses on creating and maintaining a clean set of test cases that help the team get an early feedback on the quality of the product after every release to the test environment.