TFS Administrators Toolkit

Over time I’ve written a couple of tools to ease the headaches that sometimes comes from running a couple of TFS servers. Most of them I just hacked together to get a working state, command line tool. Once the problem was solved I simply backed up the source, and went on with the next problem. This has not been a good approach for long run reuse and efficiency.

Collected and published as a Visual Studio add-in
This time then I needed some of the tools, I decided to put a little more effort into it and try to collect the different tool in a collection, build some basic UI and publish them as a Visual Studio Add-In. I will try to pick and hopefully convert the tools and add them to the toolkit as I find the needs for them.

First of: Update Reports and Work Item types for a team project collection
I actually started already, by converting two tools used to do batch updates of already created team projects. It can be quite a work to update a number of team projects with new features developed such as reports or Work Item Types customizations. With the TFS Administrators toolkit you can simply do it with a couple of clicks, and sit down and enjoy while the tools updates the selected team projects for you.
You will find the TFS Administrators Toolkit Visual Studio Add-in on Visual Studio Gallery http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/11f5e313-ced1-4713-9794-d7300c7d12e0

Iteration Manager feature complete, Public beta available

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a new Visual Studio Add-In I’ve started to work on. Thegood news is that the add-in is now feature complete, at least for the intended feature set for the first release. So far it’s undergone a limited amount of testing by a handful brave persons.

Public beta available
I’m making the plugin publicly available for anyone who wants to test it and provide feedback. If you want to test it, you can simply download it form this link https://skydrive.live.com/#cid=5D46CAE8C0008CF0&id=5D46CAE8C0008CF0!1027. Once downloaded simply open it and it will install itself inside visual studio 2010.


Current feature set
Once installed, the Iteration Manager add-in adds a new menu item to the Team Project menu in team explorer. From there you can access the Iteration Manager for the selected team project and select the operation you want to use.
Iteration manager feature set
Under the Iteration Manager menu you will find this menu to access the different operations Iteration Manager can assist you with.




New Iteration
The new iteration operations assist you in creating iterations. It can assist you with the following:
• Create the Iteration Node
• Create a Sprint work item and set iteration and dates.
• Create a new Iteration query folder, by copying a template query folder, and edit all queries to select your new iteration.

The different options will be dependent on your process template and your configurations.

Change current iteration
The Change Current Iteration operations assist you in changing the current iteration in your team project by editing and changing the iteration filter for all queries in your Current sprint folder.

Configure Iteration Manager
The Configure Iteration Manager options is a place there you hopefully don’t need to go to change anything if your running any of the common process templates. If you made customizations to your team project, or have any other needs, you can configure the different actions the iteration manager performs in the other operations.

Iteration Manager VS Add-In - Testers wanted

Are you tired of copying and editing a lot of Team Queries for every new iteration ? Are you willing to try and test a prerelease version of a new tool ?

Iteration Manager Visual Studio Add-In
I've started transforming a little tool I’ve been using to ease the bourdon of managing iterations in TFS to a full blown Visual Studio Add-In to handle Iteration management. My goal is to release it on the Visual Studio Gallery, during this spring. But before I release it would be good to have it thoroughly tested  That’s why I’m making an open invitation for everyone who would be interested in testing this new Visual Studio Add-In.

Intended feature set
This is the main features I’m intending to implement before official released on Visual Studio Gallery:

• A Visual Studio Add-In using the current team explorer connection
• Automatically configure settings based on process template
• Create new Iteration, optional configurable task:
  • Create “Sprint” work item and set sprint dates
  • Create a new team query Iteration folder based on template
• Change current iteration
  • Reconfigure team queries in current Iteration team query folder

On the backlog for future releases:

• Vs11 version
• “Repair” team queries after Rename of iteration (and areas)
• Recreate all iteration folders based on template
• Integration with Team Portals
• Integration with Reporting Services

Current state
At this moment I have a working Visual Studio Add-In integration with team explorer, offering a simply UI to create a new Iteration and create a team query folder by copying an existing folder and replacing iteration filters in the queries. The next action is to start writing the configuration and auto detection parts.

Interested – Get in touch
If you are interested in testing the prerelease version of Iteration Manager Visual Studio Add-In please drop a line on twitter (mattiasskold) or contact me on IM,you can also dropp a file with your contact information on SkyDrive and Il will get back to you.

Microsoft Test Manager Preview (MTM11)

About 18 months ago Microsoft’s released Microsoft Test Manager (MTM), a new test tool with focus on agile teams and collaboration. MTM introduced a lot of features to simplify and improve common test tasks and improve team collaboration. A week ago, at the build conference Microsoft release a Preview of the next version of Visual Studio including MTM.

Missing feature set in MTM2010
Even if MTM brought many new features to the tester, MTM do have some short comings and lack some features most testers expects. Amongst the most commonly wanted is the possibility to use Multi Line and Rich Text Formatting in Test Steps. The edit test case experience only uses a fraction of the screen to edit/view test steps. Testers have found workarounds for some issues like editing in excel and pasting back to MTM or using third party tools like the Test steps editor (http://teststepeditor.codeplex.com). Of course the list of wanted features is a lot longer, but I think those mentioned is amongst the most commonly wanted.

MTM11 addresses most commonly wanted features
The big story in MTM11 is focused around Exploratory testing , but a quick look at the preview of MTM11 it looks like Microsoft also focus on addressing the the wanted features in the next release. MTM11 now supports Multi Line, and Rich Text Formatting (even if the formatting toolbar is pretty limited). Even the test case editor is improved and a splitter is introduced so you can adjust and use all available space for viewing /editing test steps.

MTM11 Backward compatibility?
With the most commonly asked for features fixed I was curious, is MTM11 backward compatible with TFS 2010 and MTM 2010? Could I be using the MTM11 on a TFS 2010 project side by side with MTM2010 and use the new features?
After taking a test drive I found that Microsoft seems to have backward compatibility on its mind. MTM11 works directly an existing tfs2010 team project. I can view/edit/run test cases with both MTM11 and MTM2010. Using MTM11 against an old TFS2010 team project gives me a better test case editor with Multi Line editing. If I open a test case created in MTM2010 and adds line breaks in test steps they render correctly in MTM2010
However, using MTM11 against an old team project disables the rich text editing is however disabled. To enable the rich text editing you need to connect to a tfs11 project or probably do some kind of process template upgrade.

Test step editor and MTM/TFS 11?
As many teams already worked around the limitations of MTM with tools like test steps editor, I was also curious how the next generation of TFS and MTM11 react to test cases edited with the test steps editor. The questions are, does MTM11 acknowledge line breaks made by test steps editor and how will they be treated by TFS11? From my test drive it looks promising, MTM11 seems to handle line breaks made by test steps editor in an old TFS2010 team projects. Upgrading the project to TFS11 works fine, and the line breaks made by test steps editor works fine in MTM11 after the upgrade.

MTM11 Preview is a good start
This post is just based on my findings after a short test drive with a preview of the next generation of MTM, but it looks promising. If Microsoft makes MTM11 backward compatible it will make it a lot easier to implement and use the version of MTM in real life projects. Hopefully Microsoft will continue and address commonly requested features like real pause/resume of test cases (new status), edit test cases during execution, ability to bind data bound test cases against SQL commands or other data sources.

TFS Reporting

If you want to do reporting against TFS there are three different data sources to consider. In this post I’ll go briefly through the possible data sources and there usage, pros and cons.

TFS Relational Warehouse
The TFS relational warehouse is an SQL database dedicated for reporting data inside TFS. The TFS Warehouse has a public schema and is the supported place to do SQL reporting against the TFS Data. The information in TFS Warehouse is an extract from the production data and is updated on interval (by default 2 h)

TFS Cube
The TFS cube is an analysis database storing aggregated information from the TFS warehouse. The TFS Cube is most suited for reporting on trends and aggregated info. Reporting tools are primary Excel for AdHoc reporting and SSRS using MDX as the query language. For those not too comfortable with the MDX language there is a tool on codeplex (http://olappivottableextend.codeplex.com) that allows you to use excel to create the query and then lets you show extract the MDX query.

TFS Production data
If you want access to all details of the TFS implementation, without the time delay you need to go directly against the TFS production data. The only supported way to do so is by using the TFS API. The downside is that you need to develop and deploy a solution wrapping the TFS API and consume it in your report.

Summary
For most cases the TFS Warehouse is your first choice, unless you want to do reporting on trends or aggregated information the TFS Cube is probably your first choice . If you can’t do with the (small) time delay or need access to RitchTextFields or other values not present in the TFS warehouse, you will need to develop and deploy your own data source using the TFS API.

TFS OData Services as data source for SSRS reports

In April Microsoft release a beta of TFS OData Services , enabling a simply way to query and update tfs using http Url’s and atom xml data f, even from non-Windows platforms. This is good news for everyone who wants to extend tfs to mobile devices, but I saw an alternative use for it.

Looking for a SSRS data source
If you want to create reports containing details of work item, a story card report for example, you don’t really have a good data source to base your report on. The TFS Warehouse doesn’t offer vital fields like description, history and many other fields of importance. So far the best option I’ve found is to use Ewald Hofman’s solution in this post http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/Work-item-query-as-input-for-a-RS-report.aspx. Although it’s a proven working solution it requires both customizations and deployment of a web services . If TFS OData services will be a part of TFS installation it could be the answer I’ve been looking for.

Installing TFS OData services
To test the new TFS OData services, I started installing it on one of our lab servers. Quite quickly it became obvious that TFS OData install is not install that simply installs the TFS OData Services on a Server. It installs a complete development environment for developers who wants to build mobile TFS applications. To get it installed I switch to a lab devbox and installed all the tools required by the install. Once installed I needed to point the TFS OData services to a tfs server, this was no problem. One thing that caused me some problems was to handle the certificates.

OData as datasource in SSRS
As Microsoft has been pushing OData quite a bit, I was expecting it to be fairly easy to consume OData services in SSRS. Sadly I was surprised to find out that SSRS can generate an OData feed, but have no guidance how to consume OData as a data sources. After quite some time searching and asking around my colleagues I found a solution. SSRS have an XML data source, and you can specify an url as connection string. You can also specify Query parameters and how to translate the returning xml using the Query in SSRS. The following XML translates the OData response to fields in SSRS:

<Query>
    <ElementPath IgnoreNamespaces="true">
        feed{}/entry{}/content{}/properties
    </ElementPath>
</Query>

OData & SSRS - Possible but not practical
So it is possible to consume OData services in SSRS, but it’s not really practical as you specify the URL in the data source. OData uses the URL as the query specification, forcing you to have one data source for each query you intend to use. It might be possible to fix this or write an custom data source adapter for OData, using SSRS extension model.

Beta 1 shortcomings
As I got a data source and a query in SSRS, I started to create a simple story card report. Quite soon I run into trouble. Some parts of the URI’s used for accessing queries is less natural, like /ColletionName/Queries('b3844370-e517-471d-a55c-d45f9bf7716d')/WorkItems This formats with guids as identifiers for queries, instead of query name, might work if coding against it, but for manually doing reporting it’s not a great experience.
The next problem is that the beta 1 of TFS OData returns a predefined subset of a work item, regardless of the work item definition, or the query specification. This is a show stopper, at least as a SSRS data source.

Conclusion
If you want to create reports containing details of work item the best option is still Ewald Hofman’s solution to create an web service to execute Work Item Queries using the TFS API. TFS OData has to develop and grow a bit before it can be used as a data source, on the other hand it’s only a beta 1 yet. The potential is there in the OData format and if its developed and delivered as a part of TFS it could be used as a standardized data source for TFS data.

How to change iteration for Burn Down reports in project portal

Last week I needed to change the default iteration for the burn down chart in the (WSS) team project portal . My first thought was that this should be a simple task done in minutes, as the burn down chart is a SSRS report and I know I can change the default parameters for SSRS reports on the properties tab of the SSRS report.

How to change default parameters for SSRS reports
The simplest way to change the default parameter for a SSRS report is to right click on the Reports folder in team explorer and select Show Report Site. Once the report site opens up in your browser, click on the report you want to change, and then the report shows, click on the Properties tab. In the left border, click on the Parameters tab. Now you can see all parameters in the report and change their default values. Some of them are easy to change, others like the iteration parameter is not expressed in a intuitive or user friendly format.

Finding the right iteration expression
To find the value for an iteration, you need read access to the TFS Cube, and a tool such as SQL Server Management Studio. To get the desired iteration value you have to browse the TFS Cube, find and browse the Iteration hierarchy, find the desired iteration and drag it over to the query area. This procedure is described in detail in a post by John Socha-Leialoha (http://blogs.socha.com/2009/10/customizing-report-parameters-for-team.html)

In my case, and I suspect in many other cases, I didn't have read access to the customers tfs cube, forcing me to find another way to get the iteration value. In other cases, access and knowledge to tools could be a show stopper.

An easier way
As I was forced to find another solution, I came up with the idea to create a custom SSRS report showing the iterations and their corresponding iteration values/expression. Creating the report was easy, and all I had to do once created was to upload it to the server and set the data source. Once done, I simply run the report, find the iteration I need and I can copy the iteration value at the same row. Next time I need to change the iteration, I simply run the report again.
I think it is a really simple and good way to solve the problem, so if you running iterations and want to change the current iteration every 2-4 weeks, grab the report from my skydrive http://cid-5d46cae8c0008cf0.office.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/AreasAndIterations.rdl