Reporting
Hi, I’m Allen Clark, a program manager working on Team Foundation. I work on various integration facilities, and I’ve spent the mother lode of my time on reporting. I’m particularly excited about the reporting capabilities. When your team uses Team System, data is automatically captured in the data warehouse and used in reports that provide additional visibility into what’s going on in your project. For example, when you track bugs using the work item tracking tool, the data warehouse automatically collects data that enables reports like Bug Rates.
Likewise, when you publish test results, the data warehouse obtains the result data and enables reports like Test Result Details and Code Coverage Details. When you perform builds, you enable Build List and Build Details. You get the picture.
And there are reports that are enabled because of the integration between these tools. For example, when you create a bug from a failed test result, the relationship is maintained in the tools. That allows the developer to easily run the test and see exactly what the tester saw. Those relationships also make their way into the data warehouse, and enable reports like Tests Failing without Active Bugs. A team can use this report to zero in on failed results that need to be tracked in a new bug. Also, reports like Quality Indicators provide an overview of the state of the software by showing test results, code coverage, code churn, and bug rates trended over time.
You may wonder why I keep referring to “reports like…”. The reports I’ve listed here are included with the MSF Agile process template. However, other process templates will use other reports. You can also build your own reports using SQL Server Reporting Services. I’ll come back soon to talk about this in more detail.
Allen Clark, Program Manager, Visual Studio Team System
