- Client: Microsoft ALM Rangers
- Date: 2012 - Present
to accelerate the adoption of Visual Studio with out-of-band solutions for missing features. In addition, our secondary goal is to provide the opportunity for selected Microsoft consultants, support resources and partners to interact with product group experts so we can learn from our field and partners using Visual Studio ALM products and features with customers.
ALM Rangers provide the bulk of our resources which come from volunteer subject matter experts. Typically, they spend their private hours to do the Rangers project work, and, not just anyone is invited to participate:
"Rangers need to be knowledgeable about Visual Studio and ALM, have the desire to strengthen the community, and contribute regularly."
The VSTS Rangers program started in March 2006 as a joint venture between the Visual Studio Team System team and the Worldwide Communities program both in the Microsoft Services organization. A couple of years ago, we renamed our program to Visual Studio ALM Rangers, but the vision remained the same:
accelerate the adoption of Visual Studio with out-of-band solutions for missing features.
In addition, our secondary goal is to provide the opportunity for selected Microsoft consultants, support resources and partners to interact with product group experts so we can learn from our field and partners using Visual Studio ALM products and features with customers.
ALM Rangers provide the bulk of our resources which come from volunteer subject matter experts. Typically, they spend their private hours to do the Rangers project work, and, not just anyone is invited to participate.
Rangers need to be knowledgeable about Visual Studio and ALM, have the desire to strengthen the community, and contribute regularly.
Relying on volunteer part-time work has led The Rangers to strive for more efficiency in our projects. To achieve this goal, we have implemented 100% dogfooding with our own Agile-based (Ruck) process model. For consistency, we use the same process model across the board, even for guidance type projects.
The top lesson learned are from real world customers. By leveraging the vast customer connections through the globally and industry distributed backgrounds of The Rangers, we are able to collect business and technical requirements and to test our beta releases in pilot customer environments.
Stephan has been invited to join September 2012 and has immediately started to actively contribute. He has joined an improvement project and which is about to make their first release.
By participating, Stephan has direct access to the product teams, gets notified of upcoming releases and has a soundboard of many very knowledgable peers across the globe.