Jeff Beehler's Blog : TSBT-TFS

Case studies galore!

jeffbe — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:39:20 GMT

Sometimes I get so heads down in the business of shipping our next version that I forget for a moment about customers using the current version. Fortunately, there are plenty of folks around me who work directly with customers on a regular basis such as the Team System Rangers and our very own Team System evangelist, Brian Keller…they don’t let me forget for very long. Recently I took a look at the updated list of case studies for Team System adoption and was happy to see that the list continues to grow by the week. According to the search engine at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies, there are currently 102 (wow!) which are related in some way to Team System. Here are a few recent ones of note:

Chicago Bears: Football Team Connects with Fans, Drives Web Site Traffic with Desktop Application

‘The team-oriented features of Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition helped us ensure that we didn’t introduce any defects while developing,” says Strawmyer. “For instance, the code profiling capabilities of the product quickly and clearly showed that there was no processor abuse or inconsistent use of memory.”’

Merrill Lynch: Merrill Lynch Creates Development Framework for Increased Productivity

‘Merrill Lynch upgraded to Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 as soon as it became available. “We opted to use Visual Studio Team System because of its tightly integrated workflow, design, and development capabilities.”’

Starz Entertainment: Movie Provider Automates to Meet Higher Demand, Reduce Costs, Improve Brand Visibility

‘The collaboration and team features in Visual Studio Team System … make it faster and easier for a group of developers—we had eight working on MediaForge—to work together reliably.’

Thomson Reuters: Media and Information Provider Unifies Development Processes

‘Using Team Foundation Server, the team manages more than 2,000 work items, 70,000 changesets, and 200,000 files and folders. Since Online Services implemented Team Foundation Server, four other business units either have adopted it or have begun the implementation process.’

Anyway, there are many more out there if you’re interested in learning more about how other customers are using Team System.

Enjoy!

Welcome Grant!

jeffbe — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:47:23 GMT

Grant Holliday, a former Team System MVP, recently joined our team focused on adoption of TFS internal to Microsoft. Since he’s a veteran TFS user, he hit the ground running and now is a voracious force on the internal support aliases. I’m happy to see that he’s also started blogging with a similar level of energy. Looks like in the three brief weeks he’s been with us, he’s posted 15 blog entries…that’s 1/work day and he started with a handicap since the first couple days were spent in “New Employee Orientation”. I can remember when that process took < 2 hours but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and subscribe to his blog. I certainly have.

Welcome aboard Grant…it’s great to have you here!

Tools for Agility - A white paper by Kent Beck

jeffbe — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:57:01 GMT

Ajoy Krishnamoorthy, a product manager on our team, recently worked with Kent Beck to publish a great white paper on tooling for the agile team. The section on transparency really resonated with me especially this passage:

A transparent team can more cheaply and effectively coordinate their efforts towards shared goals. Acting transparently sends a signal to others that they can trust you. Trust, when realized, reduces the friction of development as people focus more on what they are accomplishing together and less on avoiding blame. Just as TDD allows me to trust my code and do more with it, trust on a team allows them to be more innovative and experimental.

I like the notion that transparency makes a team more effective, innovative and experimental. I’ve certainly run into my share of teams that claim that they can’t tell me what they’re doing because to do so would slow them down. Of course we still have plenty of work to do in order to make it easier for the tools to support transparency but I’m totally convinced that this is the right direction to go.

What do you think?

New case study for Team Foundation & Teamprise

jeffbe — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:11:19 GMT

We just released a joint case study based on the success that Thomson Reuters has had using Team Foundation Server in conjunction with Teamprise in order to adopt Team System in a mixed development shop. Since the reality of many development teams is that they are dealing with some aspect of mixed development, I expect this to be a very popular case study to read. Sharing a common, integrated source control system and collaboration server across the entire development team is a very powerful tool for teams interested in the successful delivery of great software (aren’t we all?)

Here’s a great quote to whet your appetite:

“Without an integrated toolset, we had bits and pieces of information that simply didn’t mean much or make much sense,” says Mac Noland, Lead Software Configuration Management Engineer at Thomson Reuters. The lack of integration among tools made it difficult for Online Services to manage and report on projects. “Leads want transparency and easy reporting,” explains Noland. “People responsible for writing and quality checking the code want the ability to track history and associate change requests, defects, and bugs with specific lines of code. Lacking a big-picture view and the ability to drill down into the detail, we could not effectively manage the software life cycle.”

Anyway, take a look at the full details here: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000002078.

Check out good stuff from TechEd 2008

jeffbe — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:44:38 GMT

This was a good week for Team System at TechEd 2008 in Orlando. I would recommend that you check out the TechEd 2008 Online site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/teched/default.aspx) to learn about much of what was covered. In particular, you should check out the BillG keynote in which our very own Brian Harry demonstrated some exciting new features of Rosario (you can even read more about it here). In addition, you should watch the Team System panel when you can watch an interactive session with Brian, Gert Drapers, Neelesh Kamkolkar, Peter Provost, Habib Heydarian and Norman Guadagno.

Enjoy!

Check out Brian the Build Bunny

jeffbe — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:13:45 GMT

Martin Woodward, one of our many Team System MVPs, just recently posted a blog article about a project he’s been working on for some time now. Brian is actually a dedicated Nabaztag smart rabbit which reacts to the details of check-ins and builds. I’ve seen teams use stop lights and reader boards to communicate the latest build status but never a Build Bunny. Leave it to Martin to continue pushing the TFS integration envelope.

Team System 2008 Licensing White Paper now available

jeffbe — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:59:30 GMT

Kevin Kelly, a Team System Product Manager, announced today that at long last the Team System 2008 licensing white paper has been published. I’ve lost track of the number of people who have asked about this important update so I’m sure there are many people interested in this announcement. As Kevin says, we continue to simplify this topic and as a result you can expect an update to this whitepaper in August which will include explanations and examples for both Work Item Web Access (WIWA) and the new data synchronization license.

We’re thinking hard about our licensing for upcoming releases at this time. Your feedback on better ways to simplify and communicate our licensing is welcome and timely.

Thanks!

How DevDiv uses TFS

jeffbe — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:57:27 GMT

Gregg Boer, a program manager on the TFS work item tracking team has started a series of posts outlining in good detail how we used TFS work item tracking within Developer Division to manage the Visual Studio 2008 project. Based on the popularity of my Channel 9 video covering similar topics, I suspect this will be interesting reading for many of you. Check out the first 4 articles in his occasional series:

Hopefully this explanation of how we have implemented TFS internally will help you with your own implementations. Please let us know what you think.

Thanks!

April Rosario CTP now available!

jeffbe — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:36:29 GMT

I'm happy to announce that the next Community Technology Preview of Rosario (officially known as Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System code name “Rosario” April 2008 CTP) is now available. Customers can immediately begin downloading the VPC images from our download page. Because of the size of the VPC, I'd recommend using a download manager, such as the one referred to here, to download the follow part of this release:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part01.exe
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part02.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part03.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part04.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part05.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part06.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part07.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part08.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part09.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part10.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part11.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part12.rar

For this release we worked on a number of key scenarios that we'd like you to try out. To help facilitate your evaluation, we've included samples and walkthroughs within the VPC to demonstrate these new features. Here's a list of walkthroughs broken out by product:

Architecture Edition

Exploring the existing code structure
Designing process flow as activities
Designing user interactions with systems
Designing system functionality as components
Visualizing and designing types in systems
Visualizing and designing interaction sequences in systems

Development Edition

Simplify Code Analysis rule selection with rule sets
Find and fix a bug using the historical debugger
Identify the test impact of code changes
Find a bug on a separate machine using the standalone debugger

Database Edition

Building and using an off-line representation of your operational database as a “sandbox” development environment.
Using Data Generation to custom-build data for testing your database application.
Making and unit-testing schema and code changes in an off-line environment.
Performing static code analysis of your programmability objects.

Test Edition

Planning a testing effort
Executing manual test cases
Verify the fix
Automate a manual test and add validation.

Team Foundation Server

Managing an Agile schedule
Easier reporting from Excel
Managing features with the CMMI Process
A new Add Files to Source Control wizard and support for drag and drop from Windows Explorer to Source Control Explorer
An enhanced, non-modal conflict resolution experience, integrated into the pending changes tool window
A new history view that shows labels applied to a file as well as how changes were merged across branches
A new automated build system built on Windows Workflow Foundation, featuring dynamic build machine allocation from a machine pool and distributed build functionality
Rollback for a check in (currently only available at the command line)
Many Source Control Explorer usability enhancements

As you can see, we’ve been busy since our last CTP! As with our previous Rosario CTP, this release is not a beta. We’ve done a reasonable amount of testing on the bits to ensure that most the major features work to some degree and that the key experiences listed above work well but have not done any of the configuration or deep testing that we do for a beta release that we expect customers to use on a regular basis. As such, we encourage you to take the release for a spin and evaluate the new features we’ve added but please don’t expect to use it for any sort of production usage and understand that any data that you enter into the system cannot be migrated to future releases. And by all means, any applications written with these bits may not be redistributed in any way.

We’re releasing this CTP primarily for two key reasons: practice shipping and collecting feedback. Over the past few weeks, we’ve gotten a lot of the first as we’ve worked out the kinks associated with building, testing and releasing these bits to you. Hopefully in the coming weeks and months, we’ll get a lot of the second from you. Feedback in the form of bugs and suggestions can be submitted via http://connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio. Make sure when you submit issues through Connect that you indicate the product version as being “Visual Studio Team System Code Name “Rosario” (April 2008 CTP)”. That will ensure it gets to the right folks for consideration. If you have a question or would like provide feedback to the product team, we've created a special forum specifically focused on Rosario: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1736&SiteID=1. We look forward to hearing from you.

Please join me in congratulating the Team System team on this release.

Woohoo!

jeff

Update on DevDiv dogfooding of TFS

jeffbe — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:31:08 GMT

Matt Gertz, Developer Division's manager responsible for our internal development tactics and process, recently posted an article covering the broad post-VS2008 efforts to more broadly adopt TFS within DevDiv for future product development. As regular readers of my blog know, Team System teams have been dogfooding TFS for a long time now so this change is about getting the rest of the division switched over as well. We've certainly had our share of growing pains (ever try unshelving a shelveset with 1 million files?) but we're pretty much through the transition (and fixed a number of scale related issues along the way). I posted a recent report on internal usage stats for TFS and in it you can see the increase of DevDiv users from 1,300 to 2,200 since December '07. Now you know what prompted that considerable increase.

If you're interested in learning more about DevDiv's dogfooding of TFS, be sure to read Matt's article: http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2008/03/28/milestone-quality-dogfooding-matt-gertz.aspx.

More Team System "Rosario" specs available for review

jeffbe — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:36:26 GMT

In November of last year, we started sharing a selection of the specs written for Team System "Rosario" features. At the time, we had just two specs available but the response from the community was very encouraging. As I predicted at the time, this sort of positive response would encourage others to follow suit and it has...we now have 7 specs available with 3 new ones posted in the last month:

Please take a look at these and provide us feedback. Not only will you help us make these features better but you'll also encourage other teams to go through the extra effort required to publish new specs in the future. Subscribe to this RSS feed in order to monitor future activity and join us on our forum specifically designated to promote discussion of these specs within the community.

Thanks!

Join me at our next Team System Chat

jeffbe — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:17:42 GMT

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new for these editions for Visual Studio 2008.

Add to Calendar

April 9, 2008
10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
Additional Time Zones

Internal usage stats for Team Foundation Server

jeffbe — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:54:41 GMT

Joe Schwetz, the group manager of our TFS Solution Provider team, publishes a monthly report which updates us on the internal adoption of Team Foundation Server across the company. You've heard from me before about our internal dogfooding of TFS within the Team System team (including my most recent update for Channel 9) but I haven't spent much time explaining the level of dogfooding within the rest of the company, until now. What you read below is an excerpt from Joe's monthly report. Hopefully this conveys both the level of usage as well as our excitement about continued adoption of TFS within Microsoft. As you can imagine, it's not as simple as throwing a switch to get teams to move over. We have to find the right time in the product cycle to adopt TFS, evaluate their hardware needs, help customize their system, migrate their existing assets over to TFS and ensure their teams receive the proper level of training. As you can see below, since the release of TFS 2008, we've seen a marked increase in the number of internal users not only from DevDiv, but Microsoft's IT teams (MSIT) as well as many other places within the company. It's clear from these numbers that TFS adoption is really picking up steam across the company.

Anyway, take a look at these statistics and let us know if you have any questions or comments.

From: Joe Schwetz
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 2:41 PM
Subject: March 2008 - VSTS Internal Service Offering Summary

Internal adoption continues to impress, growing by 1,085 active users taking the total to 11,834 companywide! Overall growth of the service offering continues to be driven by widespread adoption in Developer Division and MSIT with steady growth by several large Divisions. The usage outside of the large product groups and MSIT is also increasing at a strong pace, see the “All Other” users tracked on the “Active Users – Service Offering” chart.

We set a new high in the number of Work Items entered Service Offering wide in a single month, with nearly a quarter of a million being created – 246,051 in March! There were only 2 other months in the history of TFS with > 100,000 Work Items created: December 2007 with 154,926 and February 2008 with 112,441.

There were 104 new Projects created in March, this is the 11^th month in a row with >100 projects being created per month.

Here’s a quick summary of the growth at a high level:

As always, please feel free to share these numbers and statistics with customers.

Active Users Across Service Offering:

Developer Division, MSIT, SQL, MSN/Windows Live, and MSCOM all hit new peaks of active users in March. The growth of all other instances combined is continuing to mirror the growth rates of DevDiv and MSIT.

Active Users & Projects Across Service Offering:

At the beginning of the Fiscal Year, we set the goal of having 12,000 Active Users and 1,800 Projects in TFS. As you can see, we’ll be blowing those numbers out of the water by the end of the fiscal year.

Work Items – Stored in TFS 2008 & Rosario IR:

Here are details on the number of Work Items stored based on releases this month (TFS 2008 RTM and on the early Rosario bits). March was a new record for Work Items being entered, with 246,051 being created across the Service Offering!

The following shows the highest number of Work Items per individual TFS instance for TFS 2008 and Rosario IR:

Team Build – Service Offering:

There was a major increase this month in the use of Team Build. As you can see the numbers literally have shot through the roof with MSIT and one of the Consolidated instances greatly increasing the use of Team Build. For details on number of builds on specific instances see the table below.

Licensing Team System editions for your build machine

jeffbe — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:46:21 GMT

David Yack, one of our MS Regional Directors and a .NET MVP, tells me there is considerable confusion around the licensing requirements for the software installed on Team System build machines. The best resource available for these sorts of questions is the VSTS Licensing Whitepaper which goes into numerous licensing scenarios in depth. In the case of if you need a separate license of the Team System Development or Test edition on your build machine, in most cases you don't. Here's the excerpt from the whitepaper:

Those users who are authoring tests and including them as part of a Team Build type must be appropriately licensed with the relevant Team Edition product. For unit tests, Team Edition for Software Developers or Team Edition for Database Professionals or Team Edition for Software Testers or Team Suite would be required by the test author. For load and other test types, Team Edition for Software Testers or Team Suite would be required. Similarly, a user who includes code analysis in a Team Build Type must also be appropriately licensed for Team Edition for Software Developers. Users who merely execute and review Team Builds are only required to have a Team Foundation Server CAL.

The way I think about it, the people that are using the Team editions need to be properly licensed which in turn ensures the that the build machines are covered as well.

Hope this helps in some small way to reduce the confusion on this topic.

Project Server 2007 connector refreshed

jeffbe — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:29:27 GMT

I'm happy to announce that the Team System Rangers have just refreshed the Project Server 2007 to TFS connector that was originally released last year. This version has been made compatible with the recent release of TFS 2008. In addition, we've fixed a number of the most commonly reported bugs from the first 6 months of usage by customers. There are some important notices that accompany this release:

If Connector installation fails immediately, it may be due to the fact that the VC++ 9.0 runtime assemblies have not been installed on the machine. This issue was found late in testing; however we did not want to further delay getting the Connector to you. It is only needed for installation and is not needed for the Connector to run. We will be removing this dependency in a minor release (coming soon). For now, you must run the vcredist_x86.exe that is included with the Connector installation file if you run into this issue.
A change that was made to a TFS 2008 API such that the process template information is no longer maintained with a team project. However, the Connector depends on this information to determine how to map fields within a team project to fields within a PS project. Please see http://blogs.msdn.com/lfenster/archive/2008/02/14/getting-a-process-template-for-a-team-project-in-tfs-2008.aspx for a full description of the change and a tool to ensure that your team projects have the necessary information for the Connector to work effectively.

Many thanks to Lenny Fenster for his contributions to this project.

I'm eager to hear how this connector works for you and what additional improvements you think need to be made. You can post your thoughts directly to the project site on Codeplex.