Join Us Wednesday, May 23, 2012 from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

Location: Microsoft-Downers Grove 3025 Highland Pkwy, Ste 300, Downers Grove

It's BAAAACK! In case you missed the session in the loop back IN february, this month the Chicago ALM User Group will once again be reviewing more features of vNext (TFS11) and discuss the guidance on the way from the VS ALM Rangers. Angela Dugan, Jim Szubryt and Prasanna Ramkumar will be talking about and demonstrating TFS in the Cloud, Team functionality within Team Projects, Dashboard Features, Story Boarding, Feedback Functionality and changes to Team Explorer.

Angela Dugan is Polaris Solutions's ALM Practice Manager. She now focuses on TFS implementation and customization in the real world, Visual Studio related training and mentoring, and helping organizations to adopt Agile/Scrum methodologies. Angela had spent the previous 13 years as a custom application developer with a small consulting firm in Chicago, as well as did 5 years at Microsoft as an ALM evangelist. ---- Jim Szubryt is the TFS Product Manager and ALM Team Manager for the Enterprise Workforce at Accenture in Chicago. Jim’s TFS Team supports 1,300 developers in the global development centers. The ALM Team provides ALM guidance and assessments of the internally developed applications. Jim is also in the VS ALM Rangers program and has worked on the CodedUI guidance, TFS11 Upgrade guidance and TFS11 guidance on Teams. Prior to Accenture Jim worked at Magenic Technologies where he implemented TFS for clients and worked on a wide range of development projects. ---- Prasanna Ramkumar is a Senior Consultant for Magenic Technologies and a VS ALM Ranger. He has extensive experience in implementing custom solutions using Microsoft development technologies for Magenic’s clients and provides ALM consulting to them using TFS. He has led and mentored several client projects using Scrum and is well versed in Agile methodologies. As a Ranger, Prasanna has been creating the hands on labs for the upcoming TFS11 Project Guidance and is actively reviewing other projects guidance.

Agenda:6:30 - Dinner, 7:00 Presentation

Join Us Wednesday, June 13, 2012 from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

Location: Microsoft-Chicago 200 E Randolph, 2nd Floor, Chicago

In this talk, we’ll go over what acceptance testing is, when it should be used, and how to add acceptance testing into an existing application using SpecFlow. We’ll also talk a bit about DSLs (domain-specific languages), the pyramid of returns vs. effort when it comes to different types of testing, techniques for authoring and designing tests and bindings, and finally, because this *is* a group about ALM, how to integrate SpecFlow into a CI environment and why you or your organization should do so. If attendees wish to follow the demo on their laptops, they can save time by pre-installing the VS tooling for SpecFlow – http://specflow.org. The download there adds some tooling support within the VS IDE, and is not needed to run SpecFlow.

Josh Elster is the founder and principal of his independent production and consulting company, Liquid Electron. With clients ranging from small media design shops to multi-billion dollar corporations, Josh’s experience spans a number of different sectors, projects, and roles. In February of 2012, Josh joined the community advisors board for Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices team for the CQRS journey project (http://cqrsjourney.github.com), as well as being a contributor. Like the common cold, but without the whole being ill aspect, it is Josh’s hope that he can infect others with his passion for software development. When not serving as Patient Zero, Josh can be found reading, playing video games or guitar, or coding. His website can be found at http://www.liquidelectron.com. His Twitter handle is @liquid_electron. His most recent demonstration project, the PostcardApp, can be found at http://www.postcardsfromskyrim.net.

Agenda:6:30 - Dinner, 7:00 Presentation