Team Foundation's WebLog

New Features in Team Foundation

Hello! My name is Lori Lamkin and I am the Group Program Manager for Team Foundation, the core services and functionality shared by all team members in the Visual Studio Team System suite. Some readers may pause here and ask: What exactly is Team Foundation?  For those of you unfamiliar with Team Foundation, it contains server pieces to tie together the various elements and artifacts of the software development lifecycle.  It also provides client pieces for the entire project team to access this information. As a start, Team Foundation enables the entire project team to manage source code, manage work items, automate builds, manage a team project portal, create a structure and milestones for your project, create groups and set permissions shared across Visual Studio Team System.  Team Foundation also integrates with Team Test, Team Developer and Team Architect SKUs, and allows anyone on the project team to view/edit this information in Visual Studio, Microsoft Office version 11 or through SQL Reporting Services.   As you can see, Team Foundation provides the fundamental elements necessary for seamless and effective management of a team-driven development project.

I'm excited about this new blog to centralize questions regarding Team Foundation.  You may have seen the recent December CTP we posted.  If not, MSDN subscribers can download it now from http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/get/default.aspx.  This release is packed with many new features including exploring source through the Visual Studio interface, shelving and branching, customizing and printing work items, managing link relationships between work items in Office 11, and editing or changing the mapping of fields to and from MS Project.  Installation and the overall user experience across the board should be much more intuitive and polished as we've finished up our toolbars and context menus throughout. We value your feedback on comments on this work in progress. Here are the release installation instructions http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/articles/327510.aspx Check it out! 

We have been using these features internally while developing Visual Studio Team System. In fact, we are currently using the December CTP build to manage all of our work items and source code.  As a project manager through much of my career, I always struggled to get up to date status from the team without incessant nagging. :) I have found the Office features very handy and productive - my meetings don't focus on requesting status and instead focus on the cause and how to help.  For example, I use the Office 11 integration features to track our list of design change requests as new work items.  I create an Excel spreadsheet of new customer requests, and add important fields such as priority, development cost, and current state in the approval process. I regularly query the work item database to see if other team members added their own customer requests. Whether they created their own spreadsheet or added it directly into the Visual Studio interface, using Microsoft Excel 11 integration, through a simple query I can make sure my spreadsheet contains the master list of all customer requests under consideration.  As any team member updates a change request, I can simply refresh my spreadsheet and ensure that we are all on the same page with cost, priority, approval, etc. This has helped us focus on designing the high priority features first.

We are busily incorporating these customer requests into our next customer update. We are also increasing overall stability, usability and polish.  I'd like to highlight two features that are linchpins tying together the data and information swirling around a project team. These features will be fully functional in our next customer release.

Team Build is a fully extensible build automation system.  We provide a simple wizard that sets base parameters around machine location, source location, etc, and provides the scripts for you to customize the build to meet your team project needs.  We integrate the build numbering sequence with Team Test, source code control and work item tracking to report tests according to builds and to associate bugs or other work items with builds. This association happens through the natural course of your project team using Visual Studio Team System.  For example, as a developer checks in code, she can associate work items completed with that check in. The developer doesn't need to close out several work items in a separate step, just a simple check in and her work item queue is up to date.  When that source code is picked up in the next scheduled build, the work items are tagged with the build attribute.  Just by using our build automation system, you can see work items in the build ("is that work done in this build?"), or you can look at a work item and see which build it was fixed in ("which build should I test to validate that bug was fixed?").  Similarly, we associate test results with the build. The build is a key axis from which you can access all sorts of information about the state of the project and the associations with other project artifacts are created for you automatically.

Team Reporting allows you to slice and dice the project and analyze progress.  We create a warehouse of historical information on tests results, build, work item progress, source code churn, time, people, etc. We provide OLAP cubes on top of this database that you can hook into your Excel spreadsheets as a datasource or use SQL Reporting Services to draw trends and view information by build, by time, by project structure, and so on.  It is very powerful to view the relationships between the data, much of which has been automatically collected for you through the course of the team using Visual Studio Team System. We also provide several stock reports that we find valuable in measuring the progress of our own internal Microsoft projects. These reports demonstrate some of the powerful and interesting connections you can make amongst the data collected in Visual Studio Team System. For example, the Test Effectiveness Report shows the number of tests passing for each element in your project structure. We overlay code coverage information on this graph. This interesting correlation can illustrate how a portion of your project may have many tests passing, but if the tests aren't covering the code base you may have low test effectiveness. With Visual Studio Team System, you will have more data on your project progress and valuable reports to view this data right out of the box. 

With these remaining two features, we round out the full suite of integration features in Team Foundation. The work done by your developers, testers and project managers is fully integrated and related, allowing you more predictable projects and a more productive team.  We'll be going into detail on each area in Team Foundation over the course of the net few months on this blog.  In January, we are focusing on Project Management and here are the upcoming topics:

Thanks in advance for your feedback and comments, and if you have suggestions for future blogs please send them as well. Happy New Year!

Lori Lamkin

Group Program Manager

Visual Studio Team Foundation