Aaron Bjork

Process Guidance Now Online in Team Foundation Server 2010

aaronbjork — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:20:23 GMT

One of the big changes made to the Agile & CMMI process templates in 2010 was to move the guidance outside of the process template itself and into MSDN (the guidance was shipped in past versions as a set of HTML files provisioned on SharePoint at the project creation). There were many contributing factors to the decision that I thought it would be useful to write about.

Discoverability – While the guidance was discoverable from within Visual Studio, that’s where it ended. We heard from many of you that you wanted to search the guidance and reference it in other materials. MSDN was a natural solution to this problem.

Integration with Help – Having “help” topics separate from “guidance” topics proved to be another stumbling block. It was never clear if you should look for the answer to a question in the help system? Or in the process guidance? The two are now integrated together into one experience.

Maintainability – The final factor in the decision was that MSDN provided a vehicle to update process guidance after the product ships. This is a huge step forward because it allows us to address common questions/issues or new trends/tools relating to the process itself or the product.

You can see the Beta2 versions of the Agile and CMMI guidance at the links below. It should be noted that that Agile guidance is only about 60% complete in this version and the CMMI version is only about 10% complete (see the Artifacts section in CMMI). More to come…

MSF for Agile 5.0 (Beta2) Process Guidance

MSF for CMMI 5.0 (Beta2) Process Guidance

Feedback is always welcome.

Customizing Report Parameters for Team Foundation Server 2010

aaronbjork — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:25:40 GMT

John Socha-Leialoha recently posted a great article on how to modify the default report parameters for any of the reports that ship in the Team Foundation Server process templates – MSF for Agile and MSF for CMMI.

It’s quite common to want to change the default settings for parameters in a report, but Reporting Services doesn’t have a user interface that allows you to select parameters, and then save them for use again. John’s post covers:

Changing the default values that are used to render a report
Creating multiple views on the same report, each with different default parameters

You can read John’s post here.

How does MSF Agile 4.2 compare to MSF Agile 5.0?

aaronbjork — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:13:00 GMT

With the public release of Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta2 I thought I’d post some of key differences between the process templates shipped with 2008 product and the new process templates shipping with 2010. This post will focus on the new MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 process template and how it compares to the v4.2 template. I’ll follow up later with a post on CMMI.

The agile template has been overhauled to focus on the core Agile principles and values and should be more recognizable to teams practicing Scrum, XP, or some other process that includes agile practices like daily stand-ups, backlogs, burndown reports, etc. If you’re new to agile or new to the MSF for Agile process template it would be worthwhile to read Jeff Sutherland’s article on Agile Principles and Values.

Work Item Types

The work item types included in the MSF Agile 5.0 template have undergone a dramatic makeover from the work items found in the 4.2 template. Not only have new work item types and new fields been introduced, but the work item forms themselves have been reconfigured to improve usability and readability.

The Scenario WIT has replaced with a User Story WIT. Requirements are now captured in User Stories and estimated using Story Points.
The Risk WIT has been removed
The Quality of Service WIT has been removed
A new Test Case WIT and Shared Steps WIT have been added to support Test Case management.

For a full list of the work items included in the MSF Agile 5.0 template see the Work Items and Workflow topic on MSDN.

Link Types

With the introduction of link types in TFS 2010 the process model for the Agile template has been updated to include a parent/child relationship between User Story work item and the Task work item. Also included is a directed link between User Story and Test Case.

New Queries

The queries in the new Agile template have been completely re-worked to match the Scrum process.

SQL Reporting Services Reports

The reports included in the template have been updated and modified to support the new process model. A full list of the SQL RS reports included in the template can be found below.

SharePoint Dashboards

In the 2010 release each template includes a rich set of SharePoint dashboards that allow you to interact with work items directly from the dashboard as well easily create an publish reports directly to the dashboard. There are two versions of the dashboards – one built for the WSS and one built for MOSS. I’ve pasted screenshot of the MOSS dashboard below.

For more details on the dashboards see the Dashboards topic on MSDN.

Excel Planning Tools

Included in the MSF Agile 5.0 process template are two new Excel planning tools for managing your product backlog and planning and tracking iterations.

Product Backlog – used to manage the teams backlog of User Stories and do high level planning of future iterations.
Iteration Backlog – used to plan in detail an iteration/sprint (load balancing, resource assignment, etc).

Setting a Default Dashboard in TFS 2010

aaronbjork — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:01:00 GMT

I’ve been asked more than a few times recently how you can set the default page in the new Team Foundation Server 2010 project portal dashboards. Depending on which version of SharePoint you’re running a default dashboard is pre-selected for you when you create a new team project. If you’re running WSS, the default is set to the Project dashboard. And if you’re running MOSS, the default is set to the Burndown dashboard.

To change the default dashboard to something different you simply need to set the default page for your site. To do this, click the Dashboards document library link from the quick launch menu.

Next, select the dashboard that you’d like to set as the default dashboard for the portal and open the action drop down. Click Set as Default Page.

Navigate back to the root of your project portal and the dashboard you selected is now the default page shown on your portal.

Sprint Planning in TFS 2010

aaronbjork — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:54:32 GMT

I wanted to post a few screen shots of the updated Iteration Backlog workbook that will be shipping in Beta2 as a part of the the MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 process template. The workbook has been completely redesigned to incorporate usability feedback we received – I think you’ll find the experience a LOT more pleasant. Below area few screenshots. I’m planning an upcoming detailed post on how to plan a sprint with the workbook.

Capacity Planning & Load Balancing:

Sprint Backlog:

Settings:

Interruptions:

Enabling the Iteration Backlog Workbook on an Upgraded Team Project

aaronbjork — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:07:00 GMT

Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 Beta2 introduces new features and capabilities to help agile teams with planning. One of those features is “out of the box” Excel workbooks that ship as part of the MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 process template

Product Backlog – Use this workbook to create and manage the product backlog, estimate the team's velocity, and to break the project down into iterations.
Iteration Backlog – Use this workbook to plan an iteration and track its progress. This workbook helps you load balance your team effectively and ensure that your team is committing to goals it can achieve.

This article describes the steps you can take to enable the Iteration Backlog workbook for existing Team Projects not based on the MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 process template. This post is one of a series about upgrading Team Projects to take advantage of new features that ship in VSTS 2010. To simplify the steps this article assumes you’re existing Team Project is built on the MSF for Agile Software Development v4.2 process template.

Iteration Backlog Workbook

Step 1 – Download the MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 process template
Step 2 – Modify the Task work item definition
Step 3 – Create an iteration backlog query
Step 4 – Bind your query to the product backlog workbook
Step 5 – Modify the workbook document properties

Step 1 – Download the MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 process template

To get started you’ll first need to download the MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 process template from your Team Foundation Server. We need to download this template to get a copy of the Iteration Backlog workbook.

In the Visual Studio Team Explorer, right click your Team Project Collection, then click Team Project Collection Settings, then click Process Template Manager.
In the Process Template Manager dialog, select the MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 process template and click Download.
Save the process template to a local directory. We’ll use the workbook in this template in later steps.

Step 2 – Modify the Task work item definition

Next, let’s modify the Task work item definition in your current project to include the fields required by the Iteration Backlog workbook.

From the command shell, go to “Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE”
Run the following command to download the task work item type:

witadmin.exe exportwitd /collection:http://myserver:8080/path/mycollection
/p:myproject
/n:“Task” 
/f:MyTask.xml

Open the MyTask.xml file that you downloaded above and add the following snippet to your Scenario.xml work item definition under the WITD.WORKITEMTYPE.FIELDS node.

<FIELD name="Original Estimate" 
    refname="Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.OriginalEstimate" 
    type="Double" reportable="measure" formula="sum">
    <HELPTEXT>The number of hours originally estimated to 
    complete this task</HELPTEXT>
</FIELD>

Add the new Original Estimate field to the layout of the Task work item form. To do this, modify the Schedule node as follows:

<CONTROL type="FieldControl" 
    fieldname="Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.OriginalEstimate" 
    label="Original Estimate &amp;(hours):" 
    labelposition="Left" 
    numbefformat="DecimalNumbers" 
    maxlength="10" />

Execute the following command to upload the new work item definition.

witadmin.exe importwitd /collection:http://myserver:8080/path/mycollection
/p:myproject
/f:MyTask.xml

Step 3 – Create an iteration backlog query

In order to use the Iteration Backlog workbook you must create the appropriate query in Team Explorer.

In the Visual Studio Team Explorer, right click the Work Items node and click Add Query.
Create a query with the following parameters and columns.

Parameters:

Team Project = @Project
Iteration Path = <Iteration You Are Planning>
Work Item Type = Scenario

Columns:

ID
Assigned To
Title
Remaining Work
Completed Work
Original Estimate
Area Path
Iteration Path
Work Item Type

Save the new query and name it “Iteration Backlog”.

Step 4 – Bind your query to the iteration backlog workbook

Next, we’ll bind the query we created in Step 3 to the workbook.

Open the \Windows SharePoint Services\Shared Documents\Project Management folder from the process template you downloaded in Step 1.
Copy the Iteration Backlog.xlsm into a new location and open the file.
After the file opens, click the Options… button in the security warning and select Enable this content.
Place your cursor in cell A1 of the Iteration Backlog worksheet.
Switch to the Team ribbon and click New List.
Select your Team Project and click Connect.
From the New List dialog, select the Iteration Backlog query you created in step 3.

Step 5 – Bind your query to the iteration backlog workbook

The final step is to add a set of document properties that allow the workbook to communicate with the TFS reporting warehouse. Before we create the properties we need to collect some information about your project. The first piece of information comes from the table created in the previous step. As you collect these properties, copy them into notepad so they can be used in later steps.

[Table name] – Switch to the Design ribbon and select the Table Name value in the Properties portion of the ribbon
[Project GUID] – In the Visual Studio Team Explorer, right click your Team Project and select Properties. Select the URL value and copy the GUID (long value with lots of characters) at the end of the URL.
[Team Project name] – In the Properties dialog, select the Name field and copy the value.
[TFS server name] – In the Properties dialog, select the Server Name field and copy the value.
Switch back to the Iteration Backlog workbook. Click the Office button and select Prepare – Properties.
Click the Document Properties – Server drop down and select Advanced Properties.
Switch to the Custom tab and add the following properties using the values you collected above.
- Name: [Table name]_ASServerName, Value: [TFS server name]
- Name: [Table name]_ASDatabaseName, Value: tfs_analysis
- Name: [Table name]_TeamProjectName, Value: [Team Project name]
- Name: [Table name]_TeamProjectId, Value: [Project GUID]
Click OK to close the properties dialog.
Save and close the workbook.

Your new Iteration Backlog workbook is now attached to your Team Project and can be used to plan an iteration. To preserve the workbook you should save it to a permanent location (SharePoint portal, etc).

Enabling the Product Backlog Workbook on an Upgraded Team Project

aaronbjork — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:40:00 GMT

Product Backlog – Use this workbook to create and manage the product backlog, estimate the team's velocity, and to break the project down into iterations.
Iteration Backlog – Use this workbook to plan an iteration and track its progress. This workbook helps you load balance your team effectively and ensure that your team is committing to goals it can achieve.

This article describes the steps you can take to enable the Product Backlog workbook for existing Team Projects not based on the MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 process template. This post is one of a series about upgrading Team Projects to take advantage of new features that ship in VSTS 2010. To simplify the steps this article assumes you’re existing Team Project is built on the MSF for Agile Software Development v4.2 process template.

Product Backlog Workbook

Step 1 – Download the MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 process template
Step 2 – Modify the Scenario work item definition
Step 3 – Create a product backlog query
Step 4 – Bind your query to the product backlog workbook

Step 1 – Download the MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 process template

In the Visual Studio Team Explorer, right click your Team Project Collection, then click Team Project Collection Settings, then click Process Template Manager.
In the Process Template Manager dialog, select the MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 process template and click Download.
Save the process template to a local directory. We’ll use this template in later steps.

Step 2 – Modify the Scenario work item definition

Next, let’s modify the Scenario work item in your current project definition to include the fields required by the Product Backlog workbook.

From the command shell, go to “Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE”
Run the following command to download the scenario work item type:

witadmin.exe exportwitd /collection:http://myserver:8080/path/mycollection
/p:myproject
/n:“Scenario” 
/f:MyScenario.xml

Open the MyScenario.xml file that you downloaded above and add the following snippet to your Scenario.xml work item definition under the WITD.WORKITEMTYPE.FIELDS node.

<FIELD name="Story Points" type="Double" 
    refname="Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.StoryPoints" >
  <HELPTEXT>An estimate of the size of a User Story or Scenario</HELPTEXT> 
</FIELD>

Add the the Story Points field to the layout of the Scenario work item form. To do this, modify the Status node as follows:

<CONTROL type="FieldControl" 
    fieldname="Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.StoryPoints" 
    label="Story Points:" 
    labelposition="Left" 
    numberformat="WholeNumbers" 
    maxlength="10" />

Execute the following command to upload the new work item definition.

witadmin.exe importwitd /collection:http://myserver:8080/path/mycollection
/p:myproject
/f:MyScenario.xml

Step 3 – Create a product backlog query

In order to use the Product Backlog workbook you must create the appropriate query in Team Explorer.

In the Visual Studio Team Explorer, right click the Work Items node and click Add Query.
Create a query with the following parameters and columns, sorted by Rank in ascending order

Parameters:

Team Project = @Project
Work Item Type = Scenario
State <> Closed

Columns:

ID
Rank
Story Points
Assigned To
Title
Area Path
Iteration Path
Work Item Type

Save the new query and name it “Product Backlog”.

Step 4 – Bind your query to the product backlog workbook

The final step is to bind the query we created in Step 3 to the workbook.

Open the \Windows SharePoint Services\Shared Documents\Project Management folder from the process template you downloaded earlier.
Copy the Product Backlog.xlsm into a new location and open the file.
After the file opens, click the Options… button in the security warning and select Enable this content.
Place your cursor in cell A1 of the Product Backlog worksheet.
Switch to the Team ribbon and click New List.
Select your Team Project and click Connect.
From the New List dialog, select the query you created in step 2.

Your new Product Backlog workbook is now attached to your Team Project and can be used to manage your backlog of Scenarios. Make sure to save the workbook to a permanent location such as your SharePoint document library.

Team Foundation Server 2010 - Where Are My Reports?

aaronbjork — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:08:00 GMT

If you’ve upgraded your Team Foundation Server to Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta1 you’re probably wondering what happened to all your existing reports. Your Team Project works great after the upgrade, but it all your existing reports are now missing! Not to worry, all your reports are still intact, but they need to updated to work against the new TFS 2010 warehouse schema. Let me explain…

During an upgrade to TFS 2010 the relational warehouse and cube undergo significant breaking changes. In fact, during the upgrade a brand new warehouse and cube are provisioned alongside your existing warehouse and cube. The existing warehouse and cube are left intact but are no longer “active” in the sense that new data is put into them. Because of this, any already existing reports authored against the 2008 warehouse and cube continue to show pre-upgrade data. You can view your existing reports directly from SQL Server Reporting Services at http://<yourservername>/Reports/<yourprojectname>/. In addition, after an upgrade the Reports folder in Team Explorer is mapped to a new location that accounts for Team Project Collections – this is why your reports don’t show up in Team Explorer.

So, what’s the effect on new projects? Any new project created in TFS 2010 Beta1 using one of the new process templates (more about new process templates in a future post) will work fine without any modification as the reports included in the template have been authored against the new warehouse and cube. However, any new projects using a process template built prior to TFS 2010 Beta1 (ex: MSF Agile/CMMI 4.2) will need report updates just like an existing Team Project. We do plan on shipping a new set of reports for the Agile/CMMI 4.2 templates that are already modified to work against the 2010 warehouse and cube in a future release.

To get your existing reports working against the new updated warehouse and cube you’ll need to modify the reports and apply the necessary changes. I’d recommend reading the blog posts below as they describe in detail the changes made to the warehouse and cube and how you can apply them to existing reports.

John Socha-Leialoha has authored a detailed blog post entitled Upgrading Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2008 Reports to 2010 that describes the steps to upgrade your reports.
Sunder Raman has written a post describing the changes to the warehouse and cube entitled Relational Warehouse and Cube Schema Changes.

Agile Planning Tools in TFS 2010

aaronbjork — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:29:00 GMT

Ajoy Krishnamoorthy wrote a great article earlier this year describing the new Agile Planning Excel workbooks that our team built for the 2010 release of Team Foundation Server.

It’s definitely worth checking out…

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd347827.aspx

These workbooks are designed to give agile teams great “out of the box” tools for managing their product backlogs and planning iterations/sprints. The article describes the workbooks as they will be in our Beta1 release. We’re working on updates to the workbooks for Beta2 to improve usability.

Reports in TFS 2010… it’s getting easier

aaronbjork — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:40:45 GMT

Brian Keller has just posted a video on Channel9 that shows off some of the new reporting features coming in Team Foundation Server 2010.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/10-4-Episode-13-No-More-Late-Surprises/

If you’ve done any reporting from Team Foundation Server 2008 you know that there are lot of great reports in the box… but you also know that modifying any of those reports or updating them to accommodate changes in your process template can be a LOT of work. As Brian puts it… it’s not for “mere mortals”. The good news is that things are getting a whole lot easier in the upcoming 2010 release of Team Foundation Server.

Have a look at Brian’s quick video and let us know what you think.

Technorati Tags: Team Foundation Server,TFS 2010,Reports

Slide Deck Insanity

aaronbjork — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:47:24 GMT

In recent years I find myself spending more and more time staring at PowerPoint slides. I'm either:
1. Preparing a presentation and working on the supporting slides.
2. Sitting in meetings watching a PowerPoint presentation.

I've always felt that I could present things reasonably well, but I've never had a lot of confidence preparing presentation slides. I find myself futzing with them to no end and I usually fall into the trap of tweaking each slide relentlessly until minutes before the presentation.

Recently I attended a meeting where three different architectural options were laid were reviewed pertaining to a new feature in a future release. The meeting was scheduled to be an hour long and there were 15 people in attendance. When the presenter put the slide deck up on the projector it quickly became clear that the meeting wasn't going to be very productive... the slide deck was 65 slides long! 20 minutes into the meeting we were only through slide number three... and all we had done to that point was to read the mountains of text piled onto each slide... you can see where this is going. In the end it took an additional three meetings over the course of four weeks before a decision was made.

Because of this experience (and other similar ones) I picked up a book called "Presentation Zen" by Garr Reynolds. What a find! I'm not through the entire book yet but I'd already recommend it to anyone who gives presentations of any kind - not just PowerPoint. His insights and direction are brilliant and have opened my eyes to what goes into making a good presentation. At the end of chapter three Garr provides a few summary bullets I felt were worth mentioning:

Slow down your busy mind to see your problem and goals more clearly.
Find time along to see the big picture.
For great focus, try turning off the computer and going analog.
Use paper and pens or a whiteboard first to record and sketch out your ideas.
Key questions: What's your main (core) point? Why does it matter?
If your audience remember only one thing, what should it be?
Preparing a detailed handout keeps your from feeling compelled to cram everything into your visuals.

Each one of these bullets immediately resonated with me and are helping me to put together better presentations. You can read more about Garr's ideas at http://www.presentationzen.com/