Exam 70-498 - Delivering Continuous Value with Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management
Skills measured
This exam measures your ability to accomplish the technical tasks listed below. The percentages indicate the relative weight of each major topic area on the exam. The higher the percentage, the more questions you are likely to see on that content area on the exam.
Starting June 8, 2014, the questions on this exam includecontent covering Visual Studio 2013.
Please note that the questions may test on, but will not be limited to, the topics described in the bulleted text.
Define an effective end-to-end Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) (15‒20%)
- Understand the value of an end-to-end view of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools and practices
- Understand that an observable problem may be indicative of a more general process issue; explain the difference between optimizing a piece of the ALM process, such as manual testing, and optimizing the entire ALM process
- Explain the benefits of fast feedback
- Explain the importance of fast feedback related to communicating requirements, explain the benefits of end customer feedback to early software iterations
- Implement strategies to reduce end-to-end cycle time
- Identify bottlenecks in the delivery process, identify metrics that highlight bottlenecks, create potential solutions whose effectiveness can be validated, understand the relationship between work in process (WIP) and cycle time
- Implement strategies to improve software quality
- Identify process steps that introduce defects, understand the end-to-end quality process, bring quality efforts early in the development cycle
- Implement strategies to reduce waste
- Identify wasteful activities, create strategies to eliminate waste, measure the effectiveness of waste removal activities
- Create a process improvement plan
- Create strategies for implementing organizational change, identify key metrics to be tracked during the improvement effort, create consensus for the change
Define the ALM process (15‒20%)
- Role of different ALM processes
- Understand the cost and benefits of the key ALM processes, including agile, scrum, waterfall, and Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)
- Implement a scrum/agile process
- Establish self-organizing teams; holding a scrum/agile planning meeting, hold daily scrums/stand-up meetings, hold retrospective meetings, hold scrum review meetings
- Define a scrum/agile process for a team
- Establish criteria on when to cancel a sprint/iteration, establish tooling and process for scrum/agile artifacts, establish the scrum definition of "done," determine sprint/iteration length, determine how to handle backlog items/user stories not completed in a sprint/iteration, determine how to monitor sprint/iteration progress, use collaborative tools
- Implement Microsoft Solution Framework (MSF) for CMMI process improvement
- Establish project drivers (scope-driven, date-driven), assign product requirements to iterations, manage changes, manage issues
Define a software iteration (15‒20%)
- Plan a release
- Identify a flexibility matrix, identify releases based on priority items in flexibility matrix and release criteria, resource planning (scrum team is responsible for allocating team members), identify techniques to optimize a team that is geographically distributed, select a project methodology, risk management
- Define a project-tracking process
- Plan and manage a portfolio of multiple projects, identify a project tracking tool and an associated process (triage process, bug management), define how to manage effort, determine team forecast management, define a prioritization scheme, determine how to validate project health
- Scope a project
- Scope the effort for a release, define an architecture design process, define scope boundaries (is/is not list), determine the definition of “done,” define a process when effort estimates are significantly inaccurate
Define end value for the software iteration (15‒20%)
- Elicit requirements
- Define project requirements, review and clarify requirements, define acceptance criteria, define UI platform requirements (web, mobile), assign a business value
- Estimate requirements
- Manage and assign effort estimates (assign story points); resize user requirements into smaller, manageable pieces; execute task breakdown; estimate the requirements baseline
- Document requirements
- Define acceptance criteria, list requirements, add requirement details, design UI storyboards
- Prioritize requirements
- Identify requirements that are critical path, identify must-have requirements, enable the entire team (including customers) to participate in requirements prioritization, identify dependencies
Develop customer value with high quality (15‒20%)
- Define code quality indicators
- Perform code review, including security and performance analysis; analyze code for common defects; calculate code coverage; perform architecture validation
- Incorporate unit testing
- Establish unit test standards, develop a strategy for adding unit tests to existing applications, select the unit test type, establish the code coverage target
- Develop code
- Develop maintainable code; define coding standards; define application architecture; define configuration management process and tooling, including source control tree, branching strategy, solution structure, source control/check-in policy; manage multiple repositories using Git; use architecture, model, and design tools; use quality and diagnostic tools
- Validate quality
- Organize test artifacts, such as test cases, suites, plans, and requirements; define test strategy; manage test execution; perform cloud-based load testing; identify test types and associated tools; identify and configure environments; analyze test runs
- Customize a team project
- Customize a work item, customize work item queries, customize Team Portal, identify areas and iterations, manage roles and associated permissions
Integrate development and operations (15‒20%)
- Implement an automated deployment process
- Architect an automated build and deploy workflow, integrate automated tests, automate deployment into both test and production environments, review diagnostic logs for builds, manage releases
- Implement pre-production environments
- Automate the creation of virtual test lab environments, automate deployment into virtual test environments
- Manage feedback between development and operations
- Implement tools to simplify communication; identify, measure, and report key analytics and performance indicators, such as cycle time and mean time to repair (MTTR); create appropriate shared artifacts and process to facilitate communication; standardize required artifacts for defect reports; create strategies for test case reuse (both automated and manual) in production; monitor an application in production to optimize usage and performance
- Troubleshoot production issues
- Gather defect data from bugs in a production setting, provide actionable data to the development team, monitor applications running in production for potential issues, manage incident response times collaboratively between development and operations