Customizing Reports

Team Foundation — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 01:38:00 GMT

Hi, Allen Clark, Team Foundation program manager back to talk about reporting again. I want to follow up a bit on customizing your reports. The reports shipped with Team System are SQL Server Reporting Services reports. You can alter these reports or create your own reports using Business Intelligence Development Studio, the SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services designer. It’s delivered with the SQL Server client tools.

The first thing you need to do to create custom reports is to set up a Report Project. In Business Intelligence Development Studio, create a new project and select Report Project.

Next, create a couple of data sources, one to access the relational database and one to access the OLAP database. If you intend on using the reports in a process template, then call them TfsReportDS and TfsOLAPReportDS, respectively.

Now create a report. For more information on creating a report with SQL Server Reporting Services, check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/SQL/sqlwarehouse/ReportingServices/default.aspx.

You can also extract reports that are shipped with the MSF Agile process template, add that to your project, and modify it. To extract the reports, you can do one of two things.

Get a single report

Browse to the Reporting Services site (http://[data tier]/reporting)
Select a project
Select the report.
Select Properties
Select Edit
Save the .xml file as [report name].rdl

Get the entire set of reports from a process template

Export the process template
Get the .rdl files from the exported .zip file

After you’ve created your new reports, you can load them directly in an existing Team Project, or you can use them in a custom process template. If you use them in a custom process template, the reports will be included each time that process template is used to create a new Team Project.

Next time, I’ll go over the warehouse schema.

Allen Clark, Program Manager, Visual Studio Team System

Reporting

Team Foundation — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 07:58:00 GMT

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

Team Foundation's WebLog : Reporting

Customizing Reports

Reporting