Benefits of ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) using a tool like

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Team

Narrative
Overview

Reference

For years, Visual Studio has enabled software development organizations to break free of rigid, process-oriented application lifecycles that isolate development, testing, project
management and operations teams. Microsofts approach to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) provides a flexible and agile environment that adapts to your teams needs,
removes barriers between roles, and streamlines processes so you can focus on delivering high-quality software faster and more efficiently. In a world where software development is
increasingly critical to business success, the ALM principles embodied by Visual Studio are more relevant than ever. Many companies that have adopted Application Lifecycle
Management with tools like Visual Studio Team Foundation Server have seen a significant return on their investment (ROI).
For example, Xerox IDC saw a 30 percent reduction in costs by retiring other development tools and also increased developer productivity by 40 percent by using the Visual Studio IDE
with its built in integration with Microsofts ALM tools.

In the sections below, we will provide additional ROI examples and other benefits seen by various companies from several different sources including, but not limited to Microsoft specific
case studies.

Agile Planning
The prevailing attitude in the software development industry is that one of the most efficient and effective styles of project planning and tracking is Agile. Agile development practices
enable you to focus on delivering value rather than managing processes. To minimize risk and maximize impact, agile techniques must be closely aligned with business goals and
implemented across development, testing, project management, and operations. Visual Studio ALM is a flexible, integrated solution that helps you embrace an agile approach at your
pace. Integrated tools support backlog management, sprint planning, agile portfolio management, daily stand-up meetings, requirements, and Kanban boards. Increased collaboration,
visibility, and information sharing across teams ensure that developers deliver what the business really needs, faster and with reduced risk.
According to Forrester you can increase team productivity by 30%, obtain a 295% return on investment (ROI) in 2 years up to 522% ROI in 3 years and there is typically a 3 to 6 months
payback period on your investment.

Other research found that teams doing estimation as part of a full Scrum process have 250% better Quality than teams doing no estimating at all and teams that aggressively control
WiP cut time in process in half.

Socit GRICS has increased developer productivity by 50 percent on new initiatives, boosted product quality, and gained the agility to make better and faster project assignments in
response to business needs.

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Online game developer Gazillion saw time to market accelerated by 50%, delivered on-time and on-budget while accommodating an expanded scope with 300% team growth.

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Software Quality
Quality is essential to building a strong relationship with customers and assuring efficient business operations. Users not only demand software without defects, they also require
functional quality, performance, usability, and ease of use. Meeting those needs as an afterthought in the development process greatly increase the risks and slows down the delivery in
faster cycles.
Visual Studio helps you deliver high-quality software without sacrificing speed. It helps you adopt testing practices such as manual, automated and exploratory testing, as well as load
testing and lab management at every step in the development cycle, and removing the barriers between development and testing. These testing tools capture insightful information that
is stored in an integrated ALM solution and provided to the developer within the development environment, so bugs are easier to reproduce and quality can be assured throughout the
development process.
Leveraging various aspects of Azure, for example using virtual machines on Windows Azure, dramatically cuts down the time to procure, setup and maintain development and test
environments.
Teams that aggressively control work in process, (WiP), have as many defects.
Test Driven Development (TDD) practices help decrease pre-release defect density of products between 40% and 90% relative to similar projects that did not use the TDD practices.

3
5

As a result of implementing Agile, software quality has increased by 25 percent because it is much easier to track quality and testing throughout the product development process. In
addition, the development team has sped its time-to-market by 10 to 20 percent.

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Narrative

Page 1 of 8

Premium Credit Limited saw defect time to life reduced by 67% and defect management effort reduced by 25%.

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Team Collaboration
Creating software is a team effort. Every member of the team should have the right information, when they need it, and in context of their current task. Visual Studio supports
collaboration between developers, testers, project managers, product owners, and IT professionals. Collaborative activities such as code reviews, code commenting, stakeholder
feedback, and requirements definition are supported with targeted, built-in tools. And, the new Team Rooms foster communication and capture it as a durable archive of project activity.
Team Foundation Server provides a higher level of visibility and transparency, promoting trust between key teams. DevOps collaborates with development and build to ensure their
interests are baked in to the solution.

Integrated lifecycle tools help a Vietnam software development organization boost on time completion: With all the collaboration and reporting improvements, daily task completion
rates have risen by 20 percent. As a result the number of software projects completed on time has doubled from 40 percent to 80 percent.

AIG insurance group leverages ALM processes to increase team collaboration and reduce cycle time by 70%.

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DevOps
Agile practices can significantly shorten development times, but maintaining a fast delivery cadence in operations can be more challenging. In addition, processes should also be
streamlined in the other direction, from operations to development. It is critical to capture production usage information and issues to help the development team respond quickly and
foster a build-measure-learn cycle. Visual Studio extends ALM to operations, facilitating release management and automation to accelerate deployment to operations. It captures
actionable diagnostics in operational environments and delivers them to developers, empowering them to reproduce and solve production issues. By using the integrated Analytics
solution in Visual Studio Online, the development team can react to real-time usage information directly from production and integrated with the ALM solution. The result is a successful
build-measure-learn cycle that increases the value delivered to customers.

BUPA was able to shrink the deployment by 93%, lower deployment time from 2 hours to 10 minutes, and simplify the release team from 5 operators to.
Premium Credit Limited saw their deployment costs halved and has major releases every 3 weeks which is down from a few months.
Emerging Health leveraged automated deployments and automated tests to see a 2X increase in delivery functionalities and decreased environment setup time from 6 months to 1
month.

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Etsy went from deployments that took 6-14 hours to complete using a deployment army down to 15 minutes with one person.

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Conclusion
Using unified ALM tools like Visual Studio Team Foundation Server deliver many benefits, such as superior integration over using separate tools for each function, (e.g. project
management, source code control, test case management and execution, etc.). This integration provides complete traceability across functions, which may not be possible if you are
using different tools for each function. Collaboration within the development team and across different functional teams, (e.g. development and operations), becomes a part of the
everyday process and work flow. Ensuring high quality becomes part of the fabric of the software development process.
The following quotes from The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Application Lifecycle Management study by Forrester Consulting provide a nice summary of a few key benefits.

Elimination of other application life-cycle management tools The composite organization previously had a wide variety of tools in place that approximated all of the features offered
in Microsoft ALM. $25,000 in annual ongoing maintenance costs for these previous solutions have been eliminated.
Switching to Agile development methodologies means developers can roll out more projects more quickly and deliver greater value. Development cycles have been cut in half in some
cases.
Incremental revenue The IT organization delivers more tools to the sales and marketing organization that allow them to win more distribution/partnership deals with retailers. In
Year 2 of the study, this equates to $150,000 in increased sales and grows to $300,000 per year by Year 3.
As proven by the evidence found in the references noted in this document, applying agile principles and using a tightly integrated toolset results in faster cycle times, achieving a
balance between agility and quality, cost reduction, ecstatic users, more realized value opportunities and revenue growth.

Narrative

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Evidences
Refer to the table below for examples of the ROI achieved by several companies that have adopted Application Lifecycle Management with tools like Visual Studio Team Foundation
Server. Also, this document is an expansion upon the
Application Lifecycle Management overview found on the Visual Studio web site.
Ref # ALM Pillars
1
Agile Planning

Evidence
30 percent reduction in costs by retiring other
development tools and also increased developer
productivity by 40 percent by using the IDE.

Title
Technology Services Company
Improves Project Visibility with ALM
Solution

Source
Microsoft

Type and Authors

Date Link
Case study with Xerox 2012 Link
IDC

Agile Planning

With Visual Studio ALM, organizations can achieve: The Total Economic Impact of
Team Productivity increased by 30%
Microsoft Application Lifecycle
295% ROI in 2 years to up to 522% ROI in 3
Management
years
3 to 6 months payback

Forrester

Report by Jonathan W.
Lipsitz
Report by Michelle
Evangelista

2013 Link

Agile Planning,
Software Quality

Teams doing estimation as part of a full Scrum

process have 250% better Quality than teams
doing no estimating at all.

The Impact of Agile Quantified

Rally

Whitepaper by Larry
Maccherone

2013 Link

The Business Case for Agile - Seattle

Scrum Gathering

Solution IQ

Presentation by John
Rudd

2011 No Link

Teams that aggressively control WiP:

Cut time in process in half
Have as many defects
4

Agile Planning

Adopting Agile allowed for:

Reduction of Capital expense by 33%
Reduction of Cash budget by 41%
Reduction of Dollar risk by 75%
Increase of Overall return by 274%

Software Quality

TDD practice helps decrease pre-release defect

Realizing quality improvement
density of products between 40% and 90% relative through test driven development:
to similar projects that did not use the TDD
results and experiences of four
practice.
industrial teams

Springer Science +
Business Media

Article by Nachiappan
Nagappan & E.
Michael Maximilien &
Thirumalesh Bhat &
Laurie Williams

2008 Link

Team Collaboration

Provided a higher level of visibility and

Implementing Successful Continuous
transparency, promoting trust between key teams Deployment Practices for DevOps
Collaborated with development and build to
ensure their interests were baked in to the solution

ALM Summit 2013

Presentation by
Muhammad Uppal,
Eran Sher
Continuous
deployment for a
large healthcare
organization BUPA

2013 Link

Evidences

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DevOps

Increased the number of weekly deployments by Implementing Successful Continuous

300%;
Deployment Practices for DevOps
Increased the number of deployed environments
by >200%
Reduce deployment resources by 50%.
From 15 releases a month to 100 releases a
month

ALM Summit 2013

Presentation by
Muhammad Uppal,
Eran Sher
Continuous
deployment for a
large healthcare
organization BUPA

2013 Link

Agile Planning,
DevOps

Automated deployment + automated tests:

From 0 to Continuous Delivery at
2X increase in delivery functionalities
Emerging Health IT
Time to Market divided by 3
3X increased value to customers
Decreased environment setup from 6 to 1 month

ALM Summit 2013

Presentation by David
Fletcher, Claude
Remillard

2013 Link

Agile Planning,
Team Collaboration

With all the collaboration and reporting

improvements, daily task completion rates have
risen by 20 percent. As a result the number of
software projects completed on time has doubled
from 40 percent to 80 percent.

Integrated Lifecycle Tool Helps

Microsoft
Vietnam Software Developer Boost On
Time Completion

Case study Lac Viet

TFS012

2013 Link

10

Agile Planning,
Team Collaboration

ALM process increase team collaboration and

reduce cycle time by 70%.

Case study: AIG insurance group

leverages ALM to attain IT
performance architecture advantage

Interview by Dana
Gardner

2010 Link

11

Agile Planning

Increases Productivity by 50 Percent

Reduces Time to Create Working Software by at
Least 75 Percent

Software Provider Uses Agile Tools for Microsoft

ALM; Developer Productivity Climbs
50 Percent

Case study

2011 Link

12

Agile Planning

Increased the number of user stories

accepted by 32%, year over year

Case Study: Editora Abril - Agile

Development

Rally

Case study

2013 Link

13

Agile Planning

Individual team productivity is up 20-50%

Case studies: BMC software - Scaling

Agile

Rally

Case study

2013 Link

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Agile Planning,
Software Quality,
Team Collaboration,
DevOps

Complete end-to-end product

lifecycle visibility for executive
and development teams increased software
quality by 25% and development time by 10 to
20%

Comet Solutions Improves Software

Quality by 25% with Agile and Rally

Rally

Case study

2009 Link

15

Agile Planning,
Software Quality

37 percent faster delivering their software to

market
16 percent more productive
Able to maintain normal defect counts despite
significant schedule compression

The Agile Impact Report - Proven

Performance Metrics from the Agile
Enterprise

QSM Associates
(QSMA)

Report

2009 Link

16

Agile Planning,
Team Collaboration

Accelerated time to market by 50%

Delivered on-time, on-budget release while
accommodating expanded scope and 300% team
growth
40% productivity savings for Scrum masters

Gazillon Case Study

Rally

Case study

2011 Link

Evidences

Zdnet.com

Page 4 of 8

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Software Quality
DevOps

It increased test coverage by 30%

It decreased build feedback time by 77%

thetrainline.com Case Study

Thoughtworks

Case study

2012 Link

18

Agile Planning,
Software Quality,
DevOps

Release time reduced by 70%.

Deployment costs halved.
Major releases every 3 weeks down from every
few months.
Productivity savings of 1360 person-hours per
year.
Defect time to life reduced by 67%.
Defect management effort reduced by 25%.

Premium Credit Limited Case Study

Thoughtworks

Case study

2011 Link

19

DevOps

Then
6-14 Hours
"Deployment Army"

Continuous Deployment: The Dirty

Details

ALM Summit 2013

Mike Brittain Etsy

2013 Link

Now
15 Min
1 Person

Evidences

Page 5 of 8

Current Costs
Enter your current estimated costs on this tab, then look at the "ROI Calculator" tab for estimated savings
based on the data from the Evidences.
Team
Fully burdened cost of an "average" Developer
Number of Developers
Fully burdened cost of an "average" Quality Assurance Team Member
Number of Quality Assurance Team Members
Fully burdened cost of an "average" Business Analyst
Number of Business Analysts
Fully burdened cost of an "average" Database Engineer
Number of Database Engineers
Fully burdened cost of an "average" IT Team Member
Number of IT Team Members
Fully burdened cost of an "average" Project Manager
Number of Project Managers
Other Development Tools Licensing costs
Current cost of development tool licenses from other vendors redundant with Visaul Studio / Team Foundation Server S2013, (aka - a
heterogeneous environment to integrated ALM platform)

Deployment
Fully burdened cost of an "average" Deployment Engineer
Number of Deployment Engineers
Fully burdened cost of an "average" Deployment
Quality Assurance
Fully burdened cost of managing an "average" Defect

Currrent Costs

$
$

$
$
$
$

Totals
120,000
25 $ 3,000,000
120,000
10
130,000
5
150,000
5
120,000
2
150,000
1

$ 1,200,000
$

650,000

750,000

240,000

150,000

250,000

150,000
1 $
$

Totals
150,000
20,000
Totals
$

150,000

Page 6 of 8

Number of Defects per release

Cycle Time
Average Release Cycle (in weeks)

Currrent Costs

1 $

150,000

52

Page 7 of 8

ROI Calculator
Enter your current estimated costs on the "Current Costs" tab, then look at this tab for estimated savings based on the data from the
Evidences.

Team
Development team
Entire Team

Current
Savings
Costs
Low
$ 3,000,000 16% $
$ 5,990,000 30% $

Other Development Tools Licensing costs

Current Costs Savings
Cost of development tools licenses from other vendors - redundant with
$
250,000 30% $
Visaul Studio / Team Foundation Server S2013

High
480,000 40% $
1,797,000 50% $

75,000

Deployment
Fully burdened cost of an "average" Deployment Engineers
Fully burdened cost of an "average" Deployment

Current Costs Savings

$
150,000 50% $
$
20,000 50% $

75,000
10,000

Quality Assurance
Fully burdened cost of managing Defects for each release

Current Costs Savings

$
150,000 25% $

37,500

Cycle Time
Average Release Cycle (in weeks)

52

1,200,000
2,995,000

Reduction in Cycle Times

37%
33 75%

13

NOTE: Click on a link above to see the related evidence.

ROI Calculator

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