Building a Release Pipeline with Team Foundation Server 2012

September 2013

Refining your Release Process

Leaders in the world of online businesses have shrunk the timeline for software delivery from months to days or even hours. No matter what size business you have, customers now expect features such as real-time customer service and frequent releases of services.

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.

"This book provides an excellent guide to the principles and practices of continuous delivery. If you're using Microsoft's toolchain, you'll find this book an indispensable resource." Jez Humble, Principal, ThoughtWorks

System Requirements

In order to work through the hands-on labs that accompany this guidance you will need the following tools:

• Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, or Windows Server 2012
• Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate or Visual Studio Premium
• Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012
• Microsoft Test Manager
• Visual Studio Lab Management
• Community TFS Build Extensions
• Web Deploy
• Windows Installer XML
• Microsoft Excel

Authors and Contributors

This guide was produced by the following individuals:

• Program and Product Management: Larry Brader (Microsoft Corporation)
• Subject matter expert writer: Jose Luis Soria Teruel (Plain Concepts Corporation);
• Writer: Roberta Leibovitz (Modeled Computation, LLC)
• Development and test: Larry Brader and Kirpa Singh (Microsoft Corporation); Poornimma Kaliappan (VanceInfo)
• Edit: RoAnn Corbisier (Microsoft Corporation)
• Cartoons: Paul Carew (Linda Werner & Associates Inc)
• Book layout and technical illustrations: Chris Burns (Linda Werner & Associates Inc.)
• Release management: Nelly Delgado (Microsoft Corporation)

We want to thank the customers, partners, and community members who have patiently reviewed our early content and drafts. Among those, we want to highlight the exceptional contributions from our Advisor Council and the ALM Rangers.

Advisor Council

Tiago Pascoal, Ian Green, Paul Glavich, Matteo Emili, Perez Jones Tsisah, Marcelo Hideaki Azuma, Arnoud Lems, Paulo Morgado, Bruce Cutler, Mitchel Sellers, and Aleksey Sinyagin

ALM Rangers

Big thanks to Willy-Peter Schaub for his input and coordinating the ALM Rangers in contributing to the book.

ALM Ranger Subject Matter Experts

Casey O'Mara , Jeff Bramwell, Krithika Sambamoorthy, Michael Fourie and Micheal Learned

ALM Ranger Reviewers

Andrew Clear, Anna Galaeva, David Pitcher, Francisco Xavier Fagas Albarracin, Gordon Beeming, Hamid Shahid, Hassan Fadili, John Spinella, Mathias Olausson, Mehmet Aras, Richard Fennell, Tiago Pascoal, Tommy Sundling, and Vlatko Ivanovski

Related Title

• Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012

Feedback and Support

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Visit the patterns & practices Test Infrastructure Guidance Community site. This content is a guidance offering, designed to be reused, customized, and extended. It is not a Microsoft product. Code-based guidance is shipped "as is" and without warranties. Customers can obtain support through Microsoft Support Services for a fee, but the code is considered user-written by Microsoft support staff.

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