Ameyab's Blog

Channel 9 videos on VSTS 2010 and Business Alignment

2008-10-01T19:19:00Z

A bunch of videos on VSTS 2010 and Business Alignment went live today. Here are the links to those videos:

- Achieving Business Alignment with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Agile Planning Templates in Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Enterprise Project Management with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Requirements Management and Traceability with Visual Studio Team System 2010

In one of the video (third video in the list above), I talk about how Project Server and Team Foundation Server will work together to provide a complete work managment solution for app dev projects. The integrated solution spans all roles in organization - the business decision makers (CxOs), the project management office, the project managers, the dev managers, the development team - by automating data transfer between Project Server and Team Foundation server.

Channel9 videos on VSTS 2010

2008-10-01T19:13:00Z

Brian Keller (http://blogs.msdn.com/briankel/) has been posting a bunch of Visual Studio Team System 2010 videos on Channel 9 (http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010-Week-on-Channel-9/). See Brian's post (http://blogs.msdn.com/briankel/archive/2008/09/30/visual-studio-team-system-2010-week-on-channel-9.aspx) for more details.

Seattle Visual Studio Team System Users Group

2008-03-25T18:46:05Z

The Seattle Team System Users Group meets on the last Wednesday of each month. The meetings are held on the Microsoft Main campus, usually in building 118. Usually the meeting format is a presentation by a subject matter expert on a VSTS feature area followed by Q+A.

Tomorrow's meeting is in building 41. Juan Perez from Personify Design is going to talk about TFS integration with Outlook and Word. The session abstract is posted on the user group site, which is http://seattleteamsystem.org/default.aspx.

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio Team System,Seattle Visual Studio Team System Users Group

TFS - PS Connector updated to work with TFS 2008

2008-03-11T17:19:57Z

Lenny has posted an update to the CodePlex TFS-PS connector. The connector now works with TFS 2008. Ideally, the connector should have worked with TFS 2008 right from the start. However, a change was made to the GetProjectProperties method in TFS 2008 which broke some backwards compatibility. Lenny addressed this changes in the connector update. More details on this change and the fix here.

Technorati Tags: Team Foundation Server,Project Server,Connector

SSDS - SQL Server Data Services

2008-03-07T21:25:54Z

The SSDS or SQL Server Data Services program was recently announced - http://www.microsoft.com/sql/dataservices/default.mspx. SSDS is basically a set of web services that provide a database in the clouds.

This is great news for folks building and hosting their web applications. Core value propositions I see are

Reduced complexity - maintaining a database instance has its own costs. The DB maintenance complexity pretty much vanishes when the data base is available as a service
low cost of acquisition and pay what what you use- this is a no brainier. You don't have to acquire a server, the server licence, client licenses etc. Just pay based on your resource usage. For small application, up and coming web sites, this flexibility can make a bit difference.
ubiquitous access - your data is available in the cloud - securely. Access it from your web app, your mobile app, behind a firewall, from wherever.
a strong programming model - access the data using standard web protocols (SOAP, REST), a managed client library providing LINQ support.

The SSDS site has a link for registering for the free beta program. I don't know when the beta program starts (I got put on a waiting list), but I can't wait :). Meanwhile here's a link to a MIX '08 session on SSDS - http://sessions.visitmix.com/?selectedSearch=BT05 (search for "Introducing SQL Server Data Services").

- Ameya Bhatawdekar

Project Server or Team Foundation Server? Project Server AND Team Foundation Server!

2008-03-06T20:26:04Z

I have heard this question a number of times now - "Should our team/unit/company use Team Foundation Server or Project Server for managing our IT projects?".

My answer is that it is usually not an Either-Or proposition. The two solutions are complementary.

Project Server, or more accurately the Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solution, addresses the following business imperatives:

Portfolio Management: Portfolio management is all about managing a group of projects. Portfolios facilitate managing budgets, resources, timelines, dependencies, business alignment, governance etc for a group of projects in a meaningful way. Portfolios also server as a useful tool for modeling the impact of incoming work; "How does this new project affect my other projects? Do I have capacity to take on this new work? What other project can I put on hold/divert resources from etc?". Project Server integrates with Portfolio Server for advanced portfolio management.
Project Management: And here I really mean two levels of project management. The first level is managing the entire project lifecycle: managing the project through the various phases - inception, planning, execution and closing/transitioning. Some of the major activities that happen at this level of project management are building the project charter/vision, budgeting and funding, staffing, identifying measurement metrics (metrics that will quantify the project performance in each phase, across the entire lifecycle), planning the phases of the projects, identifying the work packages/deliverables, identifying the key milestones and communications. In my observation, this type of project management doesn't require very detailed project plans (with tasks, assignments fleshed out to a very granular level - say at the 8 hour, FTE unit level) - it is really all about establishing the framework for the detailed planning, execution and delivery management. This level of project management is all about developing the project plan for the business decision makers - the CxOs, the VPs, the GMs etc. Too much detail at this level is usually noise and can be counter productive. This type of project management is best carried out in the EPM world. As far as methodologies go - IMO, they are pretty similar in principle - MSF-CMMI, Traditional Waterfall, PMBOK, Prince2 etc. The second level of project management is the more tactical, on-the-ground type of project management. This is part where the work is fleshed out to a very granular level - to the level where the folks who do the work have a very clear idea of what they need to work on. when it needs to be worked on, what the dependencies are, what the constraints are etc. Project Managers have to take a frequent stock of the status and make frequent minor adjustments and occasionally major adjustments to ensure that progress is made. Now, in most IT organizations, the two types of project management activities are carried out by different people - the former by project managers from the PMO and the latter by project managers that are embedded with the development team - sometimes, rather most of times, this is the development manager/lead; but, it is not unusual to have the same project manager wear the two hats - that of a PMO or an Enterprise Project Manager and that of a Team Project Manager/Development Manager.
Resource Management: Project Server has the knowledge of all the work going on the organization and all the resources who do that work. Project Server has the authoritative resource capacity/demand information. So, Project Server is a great project staffing, cross project resource loading tool. A cool new feature in Project Server 2007 is the ability to allocate a resource's time to a project without having to do actual assignments. This feature is called "Resource Plans" - IMO, this is a pretty powerful and a long sought after feature. This makes is very easy for PMOs/resource managers to allocate resources to a project without have to work through all the resource assignment details or creating dummy assignments to decrement the resource's availability.
Time Management: Project Server has a pretty good time-sheet solution. Team members can record time against planned work, unplanned work, project work, non project work at varying levels of granularity - from the individual task level to the project level.
Tracking all the work in the organization. Project Server allows organizations to track ALL work in the organization. Not just development project, but on-going maintenance work, non development projects, non IT projects etc.

The net is that Project Server is a great work management solution for managing all the work in an organization. It is a great decision support system for the project stakeholders, the business decision makers, the PMO, the resource managers etc.

Now TFS. TFS is the development team's hub. This where the team lives day in and day out. TFS is a very flexible and a powerful change management system where the development team can track work, issues, risks, requirements. The change management system has deep integration with the test and the source code controls system as well and is hosted in the integrated development environment. This is great because it makes the developers very productive. All the tools they need are integrated and available in one place. TFS is where the day to day working of the team is managed.

So, the core TFS modules are

Work item tracking system (change management system): Users can manage their work artifacts (requirements, tasks, bugs, issues, any custom artifact that they choose to define) in the work item tracking system. Work items can be associated with test results and check-ins providing greater traceability. In addition, TFS has a policy feature that allows organizations to define working policies such as "every check in must be associated with a work item". This is pretty powerful. The WIT system UI is seamlessly integrated with the development environment. The work items can also be worked on with other tools such as Excel and Project (the WIT system has a public OM - so third party apps can easily integrate with the WIT system and provide a new management surface for the work items)
Source Code Control System: An industrial strength source code control system. The central code repository and code management system for the entire team. Again, the source code control UI is seamlessly integrated with the development tools.
Build Management - Team Foundation Server has a great build management feature set that allows teams to define build configurations, define build schedules, manage build assets (machines where the build will be performed) etc. The build systems uses the MS Build platform. Again, the build system UI is integrated with the development environment.
Test Automation- VSTS has test automation capabilities. Test results are stored in TFS. Test results can be associated with a build ("test X ran successfully for build 12.0.1.1") or a specific run. Test results can also be associated with work items ("test X ran successfully for bug # 123").
Reporting system - and finally the reporting system. All the data generated and used by the development team is in TFS. TFS provides a sophisticated data warehouse for analyzing this data. The warehouse stores not just current data, but also historical data. This enables teams to view trend information, do forecasting etc. The reports enable teams to identify areas of concern, issues in a timely fashion and react appropriately. The reporting system is a TFS cornerstone feature.

Now, the WIT system can be used for doing tactical project management, but it doesn't provide support resource management, schedule management for a portfolio of projects. TFS has no notion of a resource's overall capacity. If a resource, who is already working on tasks in a different project, is allocated work in a project, no red flags are raised. Project Server has strong resource management capabilities. Resource utilization can be managed across multiple projects. There are checks and bounds in place to prevent resource over allocations. Schedules can be managed across multiple projects - CP links (cross project links) and Deliverables/Dependencies provide a great way to manage cross project scheduling and other dependencies.

TFS doesn't really manage the fiscal aspects of the project; Project Server on the other hand has strong support for fiscal data management (resource cost rate tables, budget resources, cost resource).

One more difference that I'd like to highlight is the fact that development projects are typically executed in TFS; ongoing maintenance work is executed in other system. Anecdotally, development work accounts for less than half of the IT budget. Project Server can track all the work across the organization; app dev projects as well as maintenance work.

It makes great sense for both of these systems to work together in a complementary fashion. TFS is the execution platform and PS is the enterprise planning platform. TFS is well suited for a dev team's needs; PS is a great decision support system for the business decision makers, the PMO etc.

I drew this diagram a couple of years ago - when I was trying out the early smart art feature in PowerPoint 07 when it was still in Beta - and I think it still makes sense:

While we work on providing this functionality out of the box, there are a couple of options available currently for connecting the two systems . The PS-TFS connector solution has been mentioned on this and other blogs before. The source code and documentation is available right now. The other one is the ProjectParty solution from OranTech.

Custom Taskbars in Vista and XP

2008-02-25T20:43:48Z

I didn't know till very recently that XP, Vista supported custom taskbars, in addition to the main taskbar - the one with the "Start" button. This is a pretty cool, relatively unknown (at least I didn't know about it till now - and XPs been out since Oct 2001) feature. Here's how you do it:

1. Select a folder - any folder. In this case, I have selected one of the start menu folders.

2. Drag and drop the folder to the desktop's edge

3. A new taskbar should appear where you dragged and dropped the folder.

4. Right click on the new taskbar and customize it; add new tool bars - the same ones that are available to add on the main taskbar

Pretty nice eh. I have mine set up to show the address bar, quick links, links, a couple of folders on my HDD, a couple of SharePoint folders that I regularly access (instead of typing in the http url of the sharepoint folder, type it in as a file path; for e.g. if you want to add http://sharepoint/sites/site1/folder1, type in \\sharepoint\sites\site1\folder1). My main task bar only shows the running apps now; I use the new taskbar for general navigation, launching apps etc.

Technorati Tags: Taskbar

Demo - tutorial 2: Building TFS reports using Excel and Excel Services

2008-02-24T22:59:41Z

Here's another demo from the same reporting talk I presented sometime last year (video #1 available here).

This demo shows building TFS reports in Excel that go against the TFSWarehouse Cube. Excel 2007 had some great features that make building such reports a breeze. Advanced formatting/charting/pivoting capabilities, cubeset functions (not demoed) make Excel a very powerful BI tool.

Excel Services makes it very easy to share these reports with a wider audience. Data connection management, security, dashboards, KPIs make Excel Services a very powerful BI platform.

Here's the demo, hope you find it helpful.

Demo - tutorial: Building a TFS report using Report Designer

2008-02-23T04:37:32Z

I gave a talk to an internal team sometime last year on building TFS reports. The talk was recorded and I rediscovered that video a few days ago.

I did a couple of report-building demos during the talk. Here's one of them:

OranTech Project Party

2008-02-22T00:49:22Z

Technorati Tags: Project Server,Connector,OranTech,ProjectParty

This week I met the team from OranTech and saw a demo of their ProjectParty solution. ProjectParty connects Project Server 2007 and with Team Foundation Server 2005. It synchronizes meta-data (fields, enumerations) and data (tasks, assignments, resources) between the two system. The solution supports

many to many Project Server to Team Foundation Server mapping
many to many Enterprise Project (Project Server) to Team Project (Team Foundation Server) mapping
many to many task/assignment to work item mapping
Enterprise custom field to Work Item Field mapping with support for transformation function
Resource mapping - with support for mapping non AD Project Server uses (like generic users) to named AD users in TFS
workflow for reviewing incoming updates from TFS into Project Server
hierarchical work item structure. This is implemented via a custom TFS control.

In my opinion, the key scenarios enabled by this solution are:

Top down planning - high level planning can start in Project Server with the details being gradually fleshed out in both Project Server and Team Foundation Server. Typically most of the fine grained project details will be created and managed in Team Foundation Server.
Bottom up reporting - team members continue to work in VSTS, updating their tasks. Those updates are easily incorporated by the project manager into the enterprise project plan being maintained on the server. The PM can review the impact of the updates on the project plan prior to incorporating them into their project plan.
Planning with generic resources - PMs can plan the project using generic or team resources; the generic and team PS resources are mapped to named TFS AD users. The tasks assigned to the generic resources result in work items being assigned to the corresponding named TFS resources. The work items can be further broken down into more fine grained work items - establishing a work break down structure. The "wbs" support is implemented using the TFS links and a custom control.

I think ProjectParty is a great solution option, in addition to the CodePlex connector, for customers who want to connect Project Server and Team Foundation Server now.

How much time does my project team really have?

2007-08-29T17:14:00Z

I think one of the greatest challenges for a project manager is to have a realistic view of how much time team members can really spend on their scheduled tasks. Unplanned activities can put a big dent in projects leading to all sorts of fire fighting; either towards the end of a milestone when the project status is under intense scrutiny or on a more regular basis if the project schedule is being monitored on a regular basis. This is definitely an issue for strongly milestone driven projects; especially for fixed bid projects where the scope and the time are tightly controlled.

I have seen some interesting techniques being employed by project managers to address this issue; especially when using tools like Project and Project Server. For example, only sixty percent of the users’ time is deemed as available for project work. Or all the unplanned activities are tracked in a separate project (requiring the project manager and or the individual team member to be diligent about keeping that project up to date on a regular basis) to determine over all resource utilization and demand. I am sure that there are a number of other techniques used by project managers to keep their schedules in control

So, fellow project managers, if you have any favourite best practices, techniques or processes that allow you to reign in your project schedules, I'd love to hear about them. You can send me an email at ameyab at microsoft dot com or post your comments.

cross posting at : http://blogs.msdn.com/teams_wit_tools/archive/2007/08/29/how-much-time-does-my-project-team-really-have.aspx

Understanding the TFS cube

2007-05-01T23:00:00Z

Jimmy's first blog post (http://blogs.msdn.com/teams_wit_tools/archive/2007/04/30/understanding-the-tfs-cube.aspx) on the Team blog explains the structure of the TFS cube! He covers four perspectives* in great detail.

*"Perspectives" is a great feature in SQL Server 2005 (Enterprise Edition) that groups the subset of related cube entities, such as measure groups and dimensions, into views; it makes it easier to navigate the cube. You can learn more about perspectives here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175338.aspx.

Team Foundation Server Reporting and Visio

2007-02-28T21:57:00Z

Visio 2007 has some very cool new reporting features. I'm very excited about the the PivotDiagram features in particular. PivotDigrams can be used to slice and dice data just like Pivot Tables in Excel. Here's an example of a Visio report that shows the active and resolved bug and task distribution across a number of projects on a server.

And, here are a couple of videos that walk you through writing these reports.

Video: Building a Team Foundation Server report using Visio 2007 Part 1

Video: Building a Team Foundation Server report using Visio 2007 Part 2

Let me know if these walkthroughs were useful and if you have any other walkthrough ideas I'd love to hear those as well.

A cool report authoring tool

2007-01-23T22:51:00Z

In V1, the primary report authoring options are 1/ write SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports using Visual Studio Report Designer (part of the Business Intelligence Studio – or BIDS) 2/use Excel to connect to the cubes and build reports. Users can use also use Report Builder, a report authoring tool that ships with SSRS, but they need to build the appropriate report models first.

Report designer is an apt tool for developers. It provides a set of powerful features for SSRS reports. However, it is not a tool for the casual user, who wants to build ad hoc reports. Excel’s really meant for that purpose.

In addition to these, there are some cool report-authoring tools developed by our partner that provide powerful report authoring capabilities. Recently I had a chance to see Radius – a report designer developed by folks at 90 Degree Software. The tool allows users to author SSRS reports. The UI is very similar to the Office 2007 UI, so folks familiar with Office should feel pretty comfortable. Besides making it easy to develop reports, it allows report components to be reused. Users can “shred” their reports, save the reusable parts to a library. Other users can reuse these report parts in their reports. The V1 release supports building reports against SQL relational DBs and I have been told by the 90 Degree team that support for multi dimension cubes is coming soon. The tool is extensible and dev can write their own extensions to extract data (and build reports) from other data stores. They have already built an add-in that uses the TFS APIs as a data store. Check it out!

Tell us what you think about reporting in TFS

2007-01-18T19:12:00Z

Reporting is a very powerful feature in TFS. It has a lot of capabilities and can provide some very deep and meaningful insights across the development lifecycle. But, some of our customers aren't using the reporting system to its fullest potential.

The reporting team is interested in learning more about what you it is that you want out of the reporting system. We want your feedback on what issues/limitations/pain-points frustrate you the most, what features/changes would excite you, what reports you find useful, what reports you would like to see out of the box, what type of reports you have built, who builds these reports, the reporting authoring experience – what works/doesn’t work, etc. This information will help us chart the course for delivering the reporting features in our next releases that you will find valuable.

Please take 10-15 minutes to give us your feedback. You can access the survey here: http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB22632D8HGS3