Currently, Clemens and I are writing a whitepaper about Architecture, Application Architecture Guide 2.0 and Visual Studio Team Architect 2010. (VSTA). In addition to this paper we are also working on some ‘tooling’ that we plan to deliver with the paper. Since we are not done with the paper and tooling yet and this blog becomes a bit too quite I decided to start sharing some of our thoughts and work in this space on this blog.

One of the topics in the paper is, what we call, ‘Architectural Inspections’. Without going into too much details just yet we can think of an Architectural Inspection as a ‘check’ to help us verify the correctness of (parts of) an application architecture. The concept isn’t totally new, in fact the Application Architecture Guide 2.0 comes with an organized checklist that sums up important inspections that an architect can use during the design and/or validation phase of an architecture. Although a checklist is a great start, we think that a standalone checklist doesn’t get the most out of these so called Architectural Inspections. In our opinion it will be much more powerful if we can include these inspections in our Application Lifecycle Management practice, integrate them in the Visual Studio IDE and provide the right guidance at the right moment!

To validate our thinking, we collected all the inspections in the Applications Architecture Guide 2.0 checklists and stored them in an XML format. In fact, we used the Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) Work Item Type XML format which enables us to easily upload our Architectural Inspections into TFS as work items. In addition to the ‘core’ Architectural Inspection data, like title,  status, description (where we explain what we need to validate and can add additional guidance) we added some meta data to categorize our Architectural Inspections and make it possible to do some grouping. For example, we can categorize our Architectural Inspections per ‘Cross Cutting Concern’ (Logging, Validation) or ‘Layer’ (Service Contract, Business Logic, etc.) or ArchType (Mobile, Rich Client, Service, etc.), or whatever we think makes sense. In addition we have build a little tool that lets us upload these Architectural Inspections into TFS as work items. Currently we store our Architectural Inspections as normal ‘Task’ work items and abuse some ‘hidden’ fields to store the meta data that we need. However, we already realized that we are better of defining our own work item type for our Architectural Inspections. So, this is probably the next thing on my ToDo list…

Below you can see a screenshot of (a very basic prototype of) the tool that we are using to upload our Architectural Inspections into TFS. As you can see we haven’t spend too much time on the User Interface yet and the data in the screenshot is just dummy data that doesn’t make too much sense.

However, the most important thing right now is that by using a tool like this we (as an architect designing an architecture) can easily decide which Architectural Inspections make sense for the architecture we are designing and add only those inspections into our Application Lifecyle. This means we can, for example, add only those inspections that apply to the layers or cross cutting concerns that our architecture requires. (In a future post we will demonstrate how we can even relate the inspections to layers in our Layering Diagram.)

Another thing that we think is important is to have a clear overview of all the inspections that are considered and/or executed during the design and/or implementation of the architecture of the application. Knowing that the guidance and best practices of a particular inspection wasn’t properly implemented or worse totally neglected is important information and (potentially) tells us something about the quality of the application. Of course sometimes it makes perfectly sense not to spend time on cross cutting concern X. However, at a later time we can’t recall the reasons for not spending effort on them.  The fact that we now have our Architectural Inspections stored in TFS (as work items) makes it possible to track the current status (by using the status field (Active, Closed, Rejected?) )and provide us with valuable information about the design decisions (captured in the description field?)  that are made during the lifecycle of our application.

Last but not least we think that, to get Architectural Inspections fully integrated in the Application Lifecycle, we need a proper way of visualizing them. In fact, an overview of these inspections and their status might be good starting point for a quality check or valuable input for our testers. The most common way for visualizing the status of work items would obviously be to create a report in TFS. However, we thought we better get some experience with another cool new feature of VSTA 2010 so we decided to visualize our inspections in DGML. So, what we did is, we create a little utility that extracts the Architectural Inspection information out of TFS and generates a nice DGML diagram for that. Below you can see a screenshot of how our first implementation of this looks like. (again, we might need some UI improvements and some real data) 

The little icons in the nodes (representing an inspection) display the status of the inspection. At this moment the green check means the inspection has the ‘Closed’ status in TFS and the warning sign means it has the ‘Active’ status (so nothing has been done with it yet).

There is a lot more to tell about the things we have been working on and the thoughts we are still having about Architectural Inspections, Application Architecture Guide  and VSTA 2010 extensibility. We are currently busy improving and refactoring all of the above. In the coming period we will share some other VSTA extensions that we are working on and if things goes as planned everything will end up in the whitepaper and/or downloadable assets. So, stay tuned and of course we are very interested in your opinion, concerns, etc. so leave us a message!

A few days ago I was asked by one of my colleagues why I am spending a lot of my time experimenting with Visual Studio Team System 2010 (Team Architect), Blueprints, App Arch Guide and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) in general. He noticed me ‘living’ in VSTS 2010 CTP for some time now and he was wondering if it isn’t a bit too early for this and what I did to convice to management to let me do this. My immediate answer to this question was ‘No, it is not to early!’ and I explained that we (Inter Access) expect VS 2010 to help us optimizing our Application Lifecycle Management practice. This answer was a bit too vague for my colleague and of course the next question was how will we benefit *exactly* from investing in VSTS 2010 and ALM. Will it make our life easier?, will it makes us better people?, will it improve quality?, will it save us time?, will it save us money?

Exactly these same questions popup when discussing ALM with customers. Apparently making the business case for ALM (and/or VSTS licenses) isn’t always easy. How come?

From our experiences we learned that currently most people and organizations are relating ALM to their development activities (Software Development Lifecycle). Therefore it is only logical that this is the area where people are trying to identify their benefits (costs savings) from ALM. But is this correct? Is this focus too limited?  Shouldn’t we focus on more than only development when it comes to cost savings? Especially if we keep in mind that, on average, only 30% of the IT budget is spend on new application development (the remainder is spend on maintenance/operations)!

How come most of us still only focus on development? Is it because we still focus too much on the tools instead of facilitating collaboration between ‘Business’ ‘Development’ and ‘Operations’?

Everybody experienced in VSTS 2005 and/or VSTS 2008 will come to the conclusion that these tools mainly focus on the different roles within the development team (developer, architect, project management). Source control, unit testing and quality assurance features of these products provide us with a professional development environment and help us improving the overall quality of the products that we deliver. Work item management, a centralized store, reports, portals, etc. improve the collaboration within the development team and support project management in tracking progress, staying in control and managing risks adequately. All of this is great and potentially boost the performance of the development teams but experience learns that these benefits don’t come ‘out of the box’! Installing the tools doesn’t make the development team collaborate by default and most certainly doesn’t stimulate collaboration with the Business and Operations!

Now we know where most of us focus on for their ALM related activities, let see how this relates to the complete application lifecycle. For this we will use an the graph below were the x-axis represents time and the y-axix represents value and negative value displayed as costs.

Obviously the lifecycle of the application starts with its development. During this phase we have to make costs to design, develop and test the application. At that time the application doesn’t bring us (actually the business) any value and the complete development phase of the project only costs money. From the moment the application (parts of it?) are installed into production the appliaction starts to generate value till the moment it needs to phase out where it starts to cost money again.

What we see is, that most organizations are focusing on reducing the developments costs and (sometimes) try to shorten the time to market. Btw. it doesn’t come as a surprise that these are exactly the areas where the current releases of Visual Studio Team System focus on.

Reducing costs and make the application add value earlier is good but if we have a look at the image above we can see that the application lifecycle doesn’t end at the moment the application goes into production (where lifecycle line crosses x axis). So, wouldn’t it be great if our ALM practices help us optimize (reduce costs and/or increase value) during the remainder of the application lifecycle also?

For example, one of the things we can do to increase the business value is to practice a proper User Experience design (see this post of my colleague Andries for more info on this). By taking ‘Operations’ into account during the design and development phase of the application we can reduce operations costs during the remainder of the lifecycle. These things combined will result in an application that is more successful for a longer period of time (because it adds more value and costs less to maintain). Also, because we have done a good job developing the application, we know exactly what it does, where it is interfacing with (something VSTA 2010 will help with) and most importantly when it stops adding value which will help reducing the ‘phase out costs’ of the application.

Adding this to the graphical representation of our application lifecycle results in a graph that looks like this.

Based on this, we can now draw our new  application lifecycle which might looks something like this (dotted line is new lifecycle).

The good news is that the green area between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ lifecycle is the area were we can make money by adding extra value. The red colored areas is the place where we can make money by reducing costs. Doesn’t that look great???

Please note that ‘Reduce operations costs’ might be misunderstood from this graph. We don’t mean less value but less costs. I didn’t know how to display this correctly

Of course, all of these things don’t come by itself. We have to actually work for that to make that happen and we can’t do everything at once. In this post I am not going to detail all the steps that we can do to make that happen and where we can use the current or future tooling for. However, hopefully this last image makes it very clear that there are others areas, besides development, within the application lifecycle where we can either reduce costs or increase value. So, if anybody aks you why they should invest in ALM this image should give you a starting point for your discussion…

At least, it *did* help me explain why I should spend my time on ALM and experimenting with VSTS 2010, Blueprints and App Arch Guide

In an earlier post we mentioned that it is relatively easy to get the current Blueprints bits running on the Visual Studio 2010 CTP by modifying the .MSI in Orcas. At that time we forgot to mention that we need a few extra steps to really get things going with Blueprints in Visual Studio 2010.

When trying to build a Blueprint solution in Visual Studio 2010 we will notice the following error in the error window.

As we can see, the build task ‘BASM’ is failing to retrieve the correct path. This task is implemented in the ‘Microsoft.SoftwareFactories.Blueprints.Builds.Tasks.dll’ that can be found in ‘..\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\Blueprints\2.0’. It turns out that the execute method of this tasks looks for a (hardcoded) ‘String Value’ called ‘Blueprints’ under the ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\MSBuild\SafeImports’ tree. Because we replaced all ‘9.0’ in ‘10.0’ in the Blueprints .MSI to get it to install on Visual Studio 2010 this value doesn’t exist under ‘9.0’ anymore (but does under ‘10.0’).

To fix this we can either make sure to skip this particular replacement when modifying the .MSI in Orcas or manually add the Blueprints ‘String Value’ under the ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\MSBuild\SafeImports’ and give it the value ‘C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\Blueprints\2.0\Microsoft.SoftwareFactories.Blueprints.targets’.

Another issue occurs when debugging our Blueprint in Visual Studio 2010. Currently, there is no property page implemented for the Blueprint project type (.bpproj) and therefore starting up Visual Studio 2008 is hardcoded in the Blueprints core. To get around this we can add an empty C# ‘Class Library’ project to our solution, set this project as the ‘StartUp’ project and make this project startup Visual Studio 2010 (property page) when debugging. Although this solution does work it makes the Visual Studio instances in my Virtual PC image VERY slow (don’t know why). Another option, that does work for me, is to leave the Blueprint project as the ‘StartUp’ project, let it start up a Visual Studio 2008 instance, (and simple ignore it) manually start another Visual Studio 2010 instance and attach this instance to the debugging process of the Visual Studio instance we started the debug session in.

Now everything is in place to *really* start developing Blueprints for Visual Studio 2010 CTP!