ALM Assessment
Before deploying VSTS, Osellus conducts an assessment of your development environment measured against Microsoft and Osellus best practices and patterns. This assessment includes an independent review of your existing development methodologies, practices, systems and tools. An Osellus consultant determines your present ALM maturity level and recommends a staged improvement plan. By mapping the findings of this assessment to your business needs, we will be able to highlight the benefits you can expect to derive from your VSTS implementation.
You will use the staged improvement plan to determine which recommendations to pursue. Osellus will use these recommendations to create your implementation roadmap. The roadmap includes the activities, deliverables and training for a successful implementation of your VSTS solution. The ALM Assessment service can take between 2-10 days of consulting effort.
VSTS Express Deployment
This service can take between 5 to 10 days of consulting effort and is aimed at smaller implementations that consist of a single server, a co-located team of less than 30 developers, a single out-of-the-box process template and a single project. Osellus installs your VSTS application and configures it for immediate use by your development team.
VSTS Standard Deployment
This service is aimed at VSTS deployments that entail one or more geographically dispersed project teams that require customized processes and tool behavior to meet specific business objectives. Osellus consultants will undertake the following activities and deliverables:
- Iteration Planning: Using the implementation roadmap developed earlier, Osellus will work with your team to document the vision, scope, roles and resources for the deployment. We will prepare a project schedule with clearly defined milestone and approval gates to ensure that the project meets your timelines and budget goals. Our experience has shown that an iterative implementation plan that results in a series of smaller improvements is less likely to overload your IT resources and project teams. This approach also makes it easier to measure the improvements made to your processes.
- Usage Scenarios: Guided by your business objectives and the implementation roadmap, Osellus consultants works with your team to identify, define and document the development processes that will be used in VSTS projects. We define how each role in the process should use be used in VSTS.
- Installation and Configuration: An Osellus consultant installs and configures VSTS according to the usage scenarios documented earlier. We stage each customer implementation first on the Osellus hosted VSTS Environment Lab. This will ensure that your particular configuration is optimized for real-life deployment. Our consultant works with a representative cross section of your team to ensure all deployment related issues are ironed out.
- General Release: Once the general rollout is approved, Osellus trains your end-users on the new solution. We will establish the ongoing administration and maintenance procedures in consultation with your IT team.
- Follow-up Review: 30 Days after using the new VSTS solution, our consultants conduct a follow-up review that includes informal interviews with end users, administrators and managers to capture their early experience with the new system. We recommend potential workarounds for any obstacles that prevent you from meeting your business objectives.
Process Architecture
An Osellus process consultant develops an open process architecture that guides the ongoing development and tailoring of VSTS process templates. Your team uses this process architecture to create mixed technology VSTS templates using in-house or external methodologies such as RUP, OpenUP, MSF, ITIL and COBIT.
VSTS Migration
The Osellus VSTS Migration service is a packaged offering for organizations that intend to migrate from Rational ClearCase, ClearQuest, Rational RequisitePro and other software development tools to VSTS. Because VSTS migration projects often involve consolidating multiple ALM tools into a single VSTS implementation, they need to be planned and executed carefully. Prior to the migration, an Osellus consultant assists you with planning the migration activities, mapping the corresponding data artefacts, selecting the right VSTS connectors and developing any custom connectors that may be required for your environment. Osellus will then work closely to implement the migration plan to ensure that your intended business goals are met.
Process Enactment
Osellus consultants are industry recognized experts in enacting software development processes using the VSTS platform. The process enactment offering provides a seamless transition from the process definition stage to the stage of utilizing the defined processes in real-life projects. This involves creating and assigning the tasks and work items to practitioners in accordance to the VSTS process template. The Team Foundation Server (TFS) component of VSTS offers an ideal process middleware for enacting processes in mixed-technology environments.
An effective process enactment helps your team focus on their current assignments. It prevents process information overload by filtering the process for practitioners, ensuring that they are offered only the information they need and when they need it. Linking process tasks facilitates data rollup and feedback to process authors and project managers, resulting in continuous process improvement.
VSTS offers the necessary tooling to enact processes across the application development lifecycle. Here is a slice of what this could mean in each phase of the development lifecycle:
- Process and Project Management: Tailored process for each project, Full integration with Microsoft Project, Integrated project portal for team collaboration
- Requirements: Business requirements captured and managed to ensure end-to-end traceability
- Modeling: Visually design, configure and validate distributed applications, tests linked to requirements and work items to ensure end-to-end traceability
- Software Change and Configuration Management: Access work items, project documents, reports, builds and source control from one location
- Testing: Integrated unit testing, code profiling, code coverage, static analysis, database testing, test-data generation, manual testing, load testing, web testing
- Build and Deployment: Build Verification
Process Governance Automation
The process governance automation offering reduces the time, effort and expenses associated with implementing governance and compliance standards such as Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Manual enforcement of compliance frameworks has become prohibitively resource intensive. VSTS offers an excellent platform for automating process governance.
Our comprehensive governance solution would not only establish a process framework that results in compliant VSTS process templates, it also automates the enforcement of your compliant processes. It facilitates generating audit documentation by defining appropriate check-in policies and traceability from requirements to code. By enforcing these practices in VSTS, you will be able to meet you compliance objectives and promote good development practices. The Osellus process governance solution is built on our VSTS enactment solution and covers all areas of the application development lifecycle.
An Osellus compliance expert works with your team to implement an optimum compliance plan that will not over burden your project teams.
CMMI Automation
VSTS offers an excellent platform for automating the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) process improvement framework. Our CMMI Automation offering leverages your VSTS investment to achieve a higher CMMI maturity level. An Osellus consultant works with your CMMI team to combine VSTS process templates, work item execution and reporting to meet your CMMI objectives. The offering takes on a different form for each CMMI maturity level.
- Level 2-Manage Your Projects in Accordance with a Pre-defined Process: Osellus develops project-ready VSTS process templates. Your project managers use these templates to devise project plans that are consistent with the underlying process model. Your development team receive direct guidance on the specific tasks assigned to them. The work flow transitions and state changes are automated across all development activities.
- Level 3-Define and Deploy Organization-wide Standard Processes: An Osellus consultant defines a comprehensive process architecture to facilitate the ongoing development and maintenance of all your software development processes. This architecture is then used to define the standard processes for your organization and the corresponding VSTS process templates that can be used for each project category in a repeatable manner. We define tailoring guidelines for each standard process. Your project managers use these to tailor and instantiate the processes used in their projects. VSTS ensures that project activities and workflow are conducted in accordance to your standard processes. Your management team uses our VSTS CMMI reports to prepare for CMMI audits that would otherwise take a considerable time and effort.
- Level 4-Measure Performance and Quality of Your Standard Processes: The Osellus CMMI Automation service helps you analyze the effectiveness of your processes by determining process compliance level within a project or process usage trends across multiple projects. An Osellus consultant will help your team to use VSTS to track variations from your prescribed processes to identify early corrective measures and lessons learnt.
- Level 5-Optimize Your Development Processes for Maximum Results: An Osellus process consultant works with your team to use the VSTS data to define and monitor a set of process improvement metrics. These metrics are used to make incremental improvements to your standard processes and to stabilize these processes in the context of the process architecture developed before. Osellus assists your process team to deploy the process improvements on VSTS and monitor their effectiveness.
Short Term Assistance
You can also utilize the VSTS expertise of our consultants in the form of a point solution to a single problem that may be jeopardizing your project goals. You may have adequate resources and expertise to implement your overall VSTS solutions but may require access to an Osellus consultant for a few hours or days to address a specific technical issue after which your team can continue the implementation uninterrupted. Our Short Term Assistance service offering doesn’t require an upfront commitment from you and is suited for these cases. You access our in-depth technical expertise in any of the following areas:
- Work Item Management: Work item security access configuration; work item type customization, including definition of new item fields and configuring work item field rules based on business requirements; workflow customization; process template customization; work Item form customization; and work item custom control development.
- Source Code Management: Configure TFS version control system settings such as access control setup, configure mandatory checking notes and checking policies; and check-in policy customization.
- Build Management: TFS Build automation setup (build computer setup); and permission configuration and build task customization.
- Reporting and Data Mining: Leveraging the available reporting tools and TFS define data resource, for example, Excel or Report Designer, Analysis Service Data Base or relational database; administration of the report server and definition of share and manage permissions for TFS users; in-depth understanding of available cubes define in TFS Analysis Service Data Base; integration of customize report with TFS process template; and extending existing TFS Analysis Service Database.
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