TFS Scorecard 2010 Beta 1 released on CodePlex

Today I released a beta of TFS Scorecard for TFS 2010 at CodePlex http://TfsScorecard.codeplex.com. Since the release of TFS2010 I've been working on an adopting the TFS Scorecard to the schema changes of TFS2010 data warehouse and cube. Upgrading to the TFS 2010 schema changes was not a big deal and soon fixed. But the old version was dependent on extensions to the tfs cube.

Old version bad install experience
The TFS2008 version was dependent on extensions made to the schema of the TFS Cube for the adoption queries. This made the install procedure all but smooth and simple. To solve this problem I did a TFS Warehouse adapter making the schema changes, but it still was
an extra step to follow and I would personally think twice myself before adding an external third party data warehouse adapter to a production server.

No more extensions to the cube.
Then I started to look at how to upgrade or adopt the cube extensions, I wanted to improve the install experience, or at least not make it worse. After some thoughts I got the idea to skip the cube extensions and do SQL queries against the TFS Warehouse instead. As the TFS Warehouse contains all data used by the cube schema extensions, I could solve the problems with SQL without requiring any changes by the user. Using SQL against the warehouse instead of MDX agianst the cube could of course hurt performance, but I don't think this is a big concern as the Scorecard report is probably scheduled or viewed once a week in most cases.

Manual Test metrics
With the new test tools for manual testing (Microsoft Test Manage ) I thought it would be nice to get a picture of the adoption of manual testing with MTM. So I made an Manual Test metrics in the adoption page.

Beta release- please provide feedback
I think there is some work left to do on the TFS Scorecard report. I didn't take any time to fix the small details of the report graphics. You could always discuss and improve metrics and other features. Download and try the TFS Scorecard 2010 release from codeplex and if you have any ideas, comments or feedback in general I would be pleased if you let me know.

Back in business

This week was the first real work week for a while. For the last eight month I've been on parent leave taking care of my daughter at home. During my parental leave I've been taking a couple of smaller customer assignments. Somehow they ended up being more than a couple, leaving no time for this blog amongst other things.

But this week I'm back in business, My daughter started at the local daycare center and I went back to work. Hopefully this will mean that I can do some post on the stuff I've done during the parental leave. I also started to work on my backlog, hopefully it will result in some posts and announcements.

About announcements, this week I got an email from Microsoft congratulating me to the Microsoft Community Contributor Award. It's always nice with all kinds of feedback, all comments, emails and even awards :) are greatly appreciated and motivates me to share my thoughts, findings and experience.