Toronto - Application Lifecycle - Upgrade, Migrate, Rebuild, etc.

• Tracking multiple projects and having tools to help manage multiple projects is important and a challenge
• Release management presents issues and impacts delivery.  Tools and processes needed to help.

Here are the list of specific concerns from those participating in this learning circle.  There are:

• Lack of solid lifecycle management
• Requirement Change and Requirement Gathering
• Business Change and Business Requirement Changes
• Prototyping
• A strong rich mismatch with IT professionals and the actual client
• Unit testing - More information must be provided
• Too much code failure and the failure of the code not doing what it was designed to be doing in the first place
• More ideas needed of how to do a proper test plan
• More information needed on Software Lifecycle Development and how to do it properly
• Lots of tools, but no guidance on how to use the tools - Best practices must be made known
• A Project Management Development Lifecycle
• The tutorials for Visual Studio 2005 and beyond must be updated 
• Backward capability is poor -- especially in the world of Database Creation  -- Often, a developer would create a database and the front-end would be well designed, but the back-end of it would be weak.  Yet, one would test it and the database would function properly.  However, if the database were to go live, it would fail.  (A lot of the developers went into a white heat over this one!)
• The error feedback is very hard to understand
• The developers asked for a way to communicate with the members of the development team
• At this time, the developers are not satisfied with Issue tracking -- They feel that it is weak when documenting and tracking issues
• There needs to be a forum, a website, or a medium that would show information about lessons learned and some better documentation about application development
• A method on how to track multiple projects is needed desperately
• The configuration files are easily broken
• Too many product issues
• Too easy to mess up the different versions of software, or patches
• Better ways to do patch management
• Better ways to handle releases
• How to come up with ideas on how to create software - aka "How Microsoft does it?" or "How does Microsoft come up with an idea?"  -- The actual process