One of the tenets of agile application development is that the customer is constantly involved in the development process, always able to view the progress and get their hands on interim builds to “kick the tires” before development is finished. While a great goal, making that happen can be challenging for some teams.

In this presentation we’ll talk about how to create both customer and management visibility into a project with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS, or what used to be called Team Foundation Services) and Microsoft Azure. With a goal of not adding additional work to the development process, we’ll see how we can let the client see (and comment on) progress of our app at all stages of the process. Along the way, we’ll touch on how to use VSTS (which, by the way, is free for teams of up to 5 members) and reduce the work required in the build-test-deploy cycle.

This is an introductory presentation about VSTS and Azure capabilities, so the target audience is those developers who either haven’t heard of the tool (where have you been?) or haven’t used it much or at all.