For my TechEd demo today, I will be showing a solution that helps me to do part of my job as a development manager: tracking the bug counts in the product. At Microsoft, we have an internal system that tracks a ton of relevant bug stats in TFS and takes a snapshot of various key metrics in that system every day—for example, active bugs for a team on a given day day. I will be writing a solution that brings that bug data into Excel and Word using VSTO so it can be further analyzed. Ways I can analyze it in Excel will include using Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts against the data, grabbing this data to use in custom formulas in Excel, etc. In Word, I can create nicely formatted bug mail that I can then send to the team.
First, a bit more about the bug data. The bug data is tracked in a table that has these columns: Team, Column, Date, and Value.
Team – The team we are tracking bugs for. On my team I have 5 teams I track bugs for:
Column – The name of the bug statistic being tracked. Some examples:
Date– The date the bug statistic was gathered.
Value – The value for the bug statistic on a given day, for example Active bugs for a particular team is 50 on a particular date.
So, for my particular team, if I want to know the Active bug count for VSTA on May 1st, I would get back this set of values—this row in the table.
<Team>Project - VSTA</Team> <Column>Active</Column> <Date>5/1/2009</Date><Value>98</Value>