Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Blog - by Neno Loje : Project Management with TFS

Workflows of MSF Agile and CMMI Process Templates for TFS

neno — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:24:36 GMT

When trying to decide which of the two MSF Process Templates - Agile vs. CMMI Process Improvement - for TFS is the right starting point for your company, it helps to compare the work item types and its workflows.

You can download the full guidance from:

MSF for Agile Software Development Process Guidance
MSF for CMMI Process Improvement Guidance
Also a good source: Microsoft's Process Templates and Tools website

MSF for Agile Software Development

featuring 5 work item types: Bug, Requirement, Quality of Service Requirement (QoS), Risk and Task.

Work Item Type: Bug

Work Item Type: Scenario

Work Item Type: Quality of Service Requirement (also known as "technical requirement")

Work Item Type: Risk

Work Item Type: Task

MSF for CMMI Process Improvement

featuring 7 work item types: Bug, Requirement, Change Request, Issue, Review, Risk, Task

Work Item Type: Bug

Work Item Type: Requirement

Work Item Type: Change Request

Work Item Type: Issue

Work Item Type: Review

Work Item Type: Risk

Work Item Type: Task

As a personal note:

Both templates are a great starting point. The agile template might be a bit more lightweight whereas the CMMI template might fit more the vocabulary and processes that you are used to.

However, both are really just a starting point. In customizing the process you get way more out of TFS than with just using the built-in process templates.

Ways to access Team Foundation Server

neno — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:16:29 GMT

Pick your favorite tool for your task/job:

From Visual Studio:

Visual Studio 2008: Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer (+ SP1)
Visual Studio 2005: Visual Studio Team System 2005 Team Explorer (+ SP1)
older Visual Studio versions and VSS clients: via MSSCCI-Provider*
(includes Visual Studio .NET 2003, Visual C++, Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic, MS Access, SQL Management Studio, FinalBuilder, etc.)

From the command line:

tf.exe *: Version Control
tfpt.exe *: Work Items, Work Item Types, Version Control
PowerShell scripts (soon to be released)

From the web browser:

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Web Access (TSWA)*

From Microsoft Office products:

Excel (2003+): built-in*
Excel (for reporting): How to: Create a Report in Microsoft Excel for Team System
Project (2003+): built-in*
(for project server integration use: Project Server 2007 VSTS Connector)
Outlook (2003+): TeamCompanion* ($) by Ekobit
Word (2007): TeamSpec* ($) by Personify Design
Visio Pro (2003+): stpsoft Storyboarding for VSTS* ($)
Visio (for reporting): How to: Team Foundation Server Reporting and Visio

From other platforms or IDEs:

Java UI and console client: Teamprise Explorer and Command-Line Client ($)
Eclipse IDE: Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse ($)
Borland IDEs: SourceConneXion (via MSSCCI) ($)

From Windows Explorer:

As part of Team Foundation Server Power Tools* (soon to be released)
TortoiseSVN: via SVNBridge
Dubbelbock TFS by Benjamin Day Consulting

From other products:

MindManager Pro 7: Requirements Manager for VSTS*
SnagIt: SnagIt Output for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System*

From Windows Taskbar:

Tray icon client: Fissum*

Footnotes
(*) requires Team Explorer to be installed.
($) means the product is a commercial third party solution.

Using TFS to develop custom SharePoint applications

neno — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:52:24 GMT

Using Team Foundation Server to Develop Custom SharePoint Products and Technologies Applications

Summary: Use Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server to support SharePoint application development, and provide an integrated development environment and single source code repository for process activities, integrated progress reporting, and team roles. (12 printed pages)

Author: Microsoft Corporation, September 2008

Link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc948982.aspx

Updated: revised versino of this blog post.

How Microsoft uses Team Foundation Server internally

neno — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:02:23 GMT

A good read:

Applying Value Up at Microsoft by Sam Guckenheimer
(also available as 60-minute-webcast)
(see also: attached image about Scenarios, Value Props, Experiences, Features)
Managing work for Team System by Jeff Beehler
Internal TFS Usage: Tracking Customer Value by Siddharth Bathia
Dependency Management by Siddharth Bathia
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 1 (Our Process) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 2 (Feature Crews) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 3 (Implementing the Process) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 4 by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 5 (Tracking Progress) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 6 (Tracking multiple projects) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 6 (Addendum) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS-Chapter 7 (Tracking Risk) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS-Chapter 8 (Tracking Quality Gates) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/Dev Div uses TFS - Chapter 9 (Transparency in Reporting) by Gregg Boer

About the technical side:

Monitoring using the TFSServer Manager Power Tool by Brian Harry
Update on Microsofts TFS adoption by Brian Harry
July '08 DevDiv TFS Dogfood Statistics by Brian Harry
TFS statistics queries by Brian Harry

Using images in description fields

neno — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 11:44:38 GMT

Requires:

The use of HTML description fields in stead of the default description field.
Team System Web Access (TSWA) to insert the pictures.

Steps:

Use a HTML fields for your descriptions instead of plan text fields
(might need to copy the old descriptions programmatically).
Add the image you want to use to the work item's attachments:
Save the Work Item.
Double-click your attachment. IE opens. Copy the URL to the attachment to the clipboard.
Open the Work Item in Team System Web Access and use the "Insert Images" bottom (from the toolbar within the HTML field):
Paste the attachment-URL from clipboard:
Save the Work Item.
Done. You can see your picture in the HTML description field.

TSWA:

Team Explorer:

FIX: An unexpected error occurred while trying to add a web part to a project portal in TFS 2005

neno — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:42:00 GMT

Due to a lot of requests about this pretty common problem.

Steps you did:

You browsed for a web part:
You selected one and hit "Add":
You got the error message: "An unexpected error occurred."

This is a know issue with WSS 2.0 and a hot fix [1] can be requested at Microsoft which corrects this behavior.

I tried this with various customers and we could then successfully add new web parts after applying it.

Enjoy!

[1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/915746/en-us

Known Work Item History Limitations for Links & Attachments

neno — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:30:00 GMT

They are two major problems when looking into the history with regard to links.

1. No clue what has changed:
If you remove an attachment and add a completely different one the history will indicate that there was a change (revision gets in incremented by 1), but it won't tell you what has changed since TFS only tracks the numbers (e.g. number of external links).

2. Work Item links are only reflected in history on one side:

You have two work items: item 52 and item 53.

You decide to link item 53 with item 52.

Both items show the work item link under their "Links" tab.

Item 53 shows the new link in the history:

But the history of Item 52 shows no changes at all:

V-Modell XT Generator creates TFS Process Templates

neno — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:07:00 GMT

Microsoft Germany [1], The Center of Software Concepts at the Technical University of Munich [2] and Zühlke [3] released the V-Modell XT Generator [4] that creates process templates for working with the V-Modell, which is a process modell widely asked for by German customers working for the public sector. It is available via Codeplex.

Congratulations to Marcus Alt [5] from Microsoft and the whole team for realising this project which was quite a bit of work as I experienced first hand!

[1] http://www.microsoft.de/

[2] http://zfs.in.tum.de/

[3] http://www.zuehlke.com/index.php?id=2&L=2

[4] http://www.codeplex.com/VModellXTTFS

[5]http://blogs.msdn.com/marcalt/

Some impressions:

CollabXT V-Modell® XT Generator

Instantiated V-Modell® XT in TFS

V-Modell® XT Work Items in in TFS

V-Modell® XT Work Items in WebAccess

Changing TFS email notifications to link to Team System Web Access

neno — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 14:44:37 GMT

Thanks to this MSDN Forums post I was able to change the link included in every TFS notification e-mail to point to TSWA instead of the project portal.

Here’s the full story:

When using project alerts to get notified about work item changes you get an email containing a link to the project portal:

If you follow the link you might get a bit dissapointed when looking at this very basic work item details page:

Since Team System Web Access is now avaible from Microsoft free of charge we can change the link in the template for all notification messages to point to the new TSWA.

Changing the e-mail template

On the TFS app tier open the folder:
%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\Services\v1.0\Transforms
Create a backup of the file WorkItemChangedEvent.xsl, which we will be editing in the next step.
Replace the text:

<xsl:value-of select="DisplayUrl" />

with:

<xsl:value-of select="concat(substring-before(DisplayUrl,':8080/WorkItemTracking/WorkItem.aspx?artifactMoniker='),':8090/wi.aspx?id=',substring-after(DisplayUrl,'artifactMoniker='))" />

The bold printed 8090 is the port where you installed TSWA at.
Save the file and you are done.

If you now get a new notification e-mail and click on the link you’ll see the following much nicer work item details form provided by TSWA:

Note: Be aware that you either need to use Windows authentication with TSWA to make this work or you need to be already logged in and the session must be still alive.

I published a 2nd part: Changing TFS emails to link to Team System Web Access – Part 2

Tool for creating links to pages on Team System Web Access

neno — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 14:34:20 GMT

Would you like to send links to work items, team projects or source files on Team System Web Access?

For work items
… you can find the answer in the offical TSWA FAQ:

Q: What’s the URL to use if I want to send the link of a specific work item?

A: Work item links use the follwing format:

http://[TSWA:port]/wi.aspx?id=[WorkItemID]

For Team Projects
… it also pretty simple:

http://[TSWA:port]/index.aspx?pname=[ProjectName]

For Source Files
… it’s a little bit more “interesting” (thanks to Hakan from Microsoft for reveiling the details behind this secret).

It’s a bit tricky but here it goes:

http://[TSWA:port]/UI/Pages/Scc/ViewSource.aspx?scc-item=[ItemData]

ItemData is the HtmlEncoded output of the query string something like “id=10&cs=-1”

id: the ID of the item in source control (you need to know this instead of the file path)

cs: changeset number (-1: latest)

In your example, the file id is 151611. So,

HtmlEncode(“id=151611&cs=-1”) -> “id%3D151611%26cs%3D-1”

https://[TSWA:port]/UI/Pages/Scc/ViewSource.aspx?scc-item=id%3D151611%26cs%3D-1

[We’re planning to provide more friendly URLs in a future version, similar to wi.aspx approach]

To make it fast and more convenient to create links to TSWA I created a small tool to help you with it:

It should be mentioned that this tool has a lot of room for improvement. :-)

You can download the source from an updated version here.

Use SnagIt to capure your screen and create a new Work Item quickly

neno — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 23:06:36 GMT

Capturing screenshots and new bugs quickly is a everyday task for software developers and testers.

The default Work Item form does not handle this scenario very efficiently, i.e. you have to click too many times until the new bug is created.

One nice solution comes out of TechSmith, the creators of the popular SnagIt screen capture tool. As Betsy Weber announced it they made a New “SnagIt Output for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System” [1] available which lets you create new Work Items with screenshots attached or update existing ones with ease.

Let’s try how it looks like…

You take a capture of your screen using SnagIt.
You use one of SnagIt’s diverse editing functions to make clear what’s the problem is (e.g. arrows, or text).
You click the new “Team System” bottom in the toolbar and select “New Work Item” if there is no work item existing already.
You supply connection information to your Team Foundation Server as well as which type of work item you want to create, what the name of the attached file and the associated comment should be.
After hitting “Create” you get the well-known Work Item form where you could supply more details on the bug.
Alternatively you can also add the screenshot to an already existing work item by hitting “Update Work Item” from the Team System toolbar menu.
This let’s you search for the bug and updating it’s attachments.
In either way the result is a nicely attached screenshot in your work item.

You can also watch a video [2] by TechSmith of the new output in Action.

[1] http://visuallounge.techsmith.com/2007/05/new_snagit_output_for_microsoft_visual_studio_team_system.html

[2] http://video.techsmith.com/snagit/accessories/teamsystem/enu/teamsystem.html

Validation error when saving Work Items after a user is removed from Active Directory

neno — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 09:56:28 GMT

Problem: If you remove a user from Active Directory or the local machine (depending where you store your user accounts for TFS), all work items that were assigned to that user cannot be modified anymore, at least if you use the default MSF process templates.

The following validation error appears that requires the value in the “Assigned To” field to be a valid user:

Workaround 1 (easiest): Just reassign the bug to yourself or someone else. Caveat: You probably don’t want to do that because the information is then not correct anymore since it was not you working on the work item.

Workaround 2 (recommended): You can modify the Work Item Type definitions so that the “Assigned to” field does not re-validate values that have been successfully validated in the past. In this case there would be not error, however if you put in a new name into the “Assigned to” field it would be validated.

Export the WIT (Work Item Type) of which you want to change the behavior as described using the Microsoft Process Editor.
Add the ALLOWEXISTINGVALUE rule to the field definition of the “Assigned to” field.
Save and import the WIT into your team projects and you’re ready to go.

Note: Be aware that you need to change all Work Item Types and for all team project separately where you want the new behavior to be used.

-Neno

Available Check-In-Policies for Team Foundation Server

neno — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 21:29:00 GMT

Included in Visual Studio 2005 Team System:

Work Items
Code Analysis: Check-in policy can be used to control and improve the quality of code that is checked into the code base.
Testing Policy

As part of the Visual Studio SDK September 2006 (can be downloaded for free):

Example.SimpleCheckinPolcy: Sample C# class to enforce check in comments. Demonstrates customizability of check in policies. Can be found unter:
%ProgramFiles%\Visual Studio 2005 SDK\2006.09\VisualStudioTeamSystemIntegration\Version Control\ExtensibilityPolicySample
Example.ForbiddenPatternsCheckinPolicy: Sample C# project demonstrating a customizable forbidden patterns check-in policy. This sample provides the base C# project for defining a forbidden regular expression check in policy. Can be found unter:
%ProgramFiles%\Visual Studio 2005 SDK\2006.09\VisualStudioTeamSystemIntegration\Version Control\CheckinPoliciesForbiddenPatterns

Developed by the community:

TFS Custom Path CheckIn Policy: The Custom Path CheckIn Policy works in concert with existing Team Foundation Server (TFS) check-in policies, providing a mechanism that allows you to specify the source control path(s) that a particular policy is allowed to act on. This will allow for example a single Team Project to have one set of Code Analysis rules for a particular folder and completely different set of rules for another folder. It would also allow for filtering what specific items the rules work on for instance enforcing a Work Item for any check-in of files ending in ".cs, .sln, .csproj" but ignore the rule for all other check-ins.
Time That Task VSTS Check-In Policy: Custom VSTS check-in policy that gathers hours worked on a task during each check-in. This policy requires check-in to be associated with only one task that is in an "Active" status. It also gathers the number of hours worked on the associated task incrementing the completed hours and decrementing the remaining hours. If the number of hours worked on code in check-in is greater than remaining work hours on the associated task, user will be asked to re-estimate the number or hours remaining for the task.
Check for Comments Check-In Policy: Doesn't need an explaination, I think...
TFS - Code Comments Check-in Policy: This Team Foundation Server policy ensures that the code contains comments for classes, methods and properties before checking in it to the source control server.
TFS Code Review Workflow:This project is a combination of a Code Review Work Item and a Code Review Check-in Policy. The check-in policy doesn’t allow a check-in unless it has an associated Code Review work item, and that work item is set to approved. Only people in a TFS group named {Project}\Code Reviewers can set an item to approved: Code Review Work Item, Code Review Custom Check-In Policy and Code Reviewers Security Group.

Will be made available by Microsoft as Check-in Policies Pack:

Check-in policy granularity: there is one already in Code Gallery and what we will do is package this, change some of the UI and take out some of the complexity
Work-Item Associations: This is a very cool one that I hope many of you will find useful. You get to specify a query and if the associated work items by the developer are not part of the query results the check-in is blocked. This is very useful when it comes to making sure that check-ins are always associated with approved bugs.
Banned files: this policy allows you to specify a file extension or a regular expression in order to keep files that you don’t want out of version control. This is usually used for dll’s, build artifacts, or some website files that are automatically generated.
Check-in Comments: this policy gets shipped as part of the SDK. It looks at the check-in comments and makes sure it is not blank.

You know more? Don't let us die in ignorance: drop me a comment or contact me.

This list will be updated as new items arrive...

Book: Managing Projects with Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team System

neno — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 21:58:00 GMT

		Author		Joel Semeniuk; Martin Danner
		Pages		400
		Disk		N/A
		Level		Advanced
		Published		08/09/2006
		ISBN		0-7356-2216-7

View on MS Press website

About the Book

An ideal guide for using Visual Studio Team System to maximize project management effectiveness

This book is a practical guide to using the integrated tools in Visual Studio Team System to manage a team-development process. Project managers typically use a wide range of tools—such as Microsoft Office Excel®, Microsoft Office Project, and Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services. The Visual Studio Project Management Tools are integrated with the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), Office, Windows SharePoint Services, and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Reporting Services. This helps enable project managers to continue using the tools with which they are comfortable, yet easily share their development-oriented project data with their teams—allowing architects, developers, testers, and project managers to collaborate in a single, extensible environment. With in-depth product information and insights from early users and experienced Visual Studio Team System trainers, this guide will help you understand how to use this tightly integrated set of life-cycle development tools to help enable better planning, scheduling, collaboration, communication, reporting, and process control with development projects.