There have been quite a few development posts in our blog as of late, so I thought I’d share some current activities from our products and services front.

In the past month, we welcomed three new customers to our IRIS Product Suite and Content Bridge for VSTS, including a large Canadian Federal government agency. Two of the customers were specifically looking for a solution to bring RUP or RUP-inspired methodology into VSTS for process enactment. After evaluating their requirements, we selected the right tool from our product family and provided our expertise in this area to deliver the needed solutions for them.

As VSTS continues to gain maturity as an ALM tool, we have noticed growing interest in processes and process integration within the development environment to facilitate its enactment. Organizations who have adopted TFS initially for centralized source control and automated build capabilities are now ready for more. After having deployed and migrated existing projects to VSTS, many are looking into bringing their own processes into the tool to benefit from process guidance and work item tracking in their daily development activities.

However, creating process templates for proprietary processes remains a challenge. In this regard, it is a pity that a process tool, such as RMC, does not provide cross-platform support to generate process templates that can be used in a (competitor) enactment platform.

I believe that a well-rounded process tool should not only satisfy the modeling needs of process authors, but also provide the necessary support to help project teams deploy and implement processes in a chosen enactment tool, whichever it may be.

For those who are interested in seeing an RUP process template live in action in VSTS, here is a recording of a webinar that we hosted with Microsoft last year. In this webinar, I used an RUP Process Template for Small Projects as an example to create a project in VSTS.