Steven Wright Blog

As mentioned in the previous post: Automating building of SSIS projects , I am working on integrating our SSIS projects into our continuous build/deployment process. In this post, I will cover my implementation of automating the deployment of SSIS projects. Our continuous delivery pipeline uses the Octopus Deploy platform which is a release management; automated deploy and operation runbook platform that consists of a central server and deployment agents referred to as tentacles. The tentacles receive the deployment packages, which contains the code being deployed, and runs the deployment scripts. The server is where all the deployment packages are stored; deployment projects are maintained and the management of the following: infrastructure, users and server. Octopus deployment projects are defined as steps from one of the following templates types: Built-in, custom or Community ...

I am currently working for a healthcare solutions company on one of their leading products. Presently we are working on improving our continuous build/deployment processes. I have been looking into how to include all our SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) projects and would like to share the approach taken for the continuous build in this blog post. Automating the build of SSIS project(s) is not as straightforward as it is for the .Net projects. One of the main barriers is that for SSIS projects there is no native support in the visual studio standard build tool (MSBuild). If you wish to use MSBuild you would need to write your own build file with a custom extension library that you would have either created yourself or downloaded from a community/open source code sharing site.My approach was to use PowerShell to do the following: Read an XML config file which has the solution and projects files paths along with build configuration. Find the path to visual studio. By using...

The Scrum for Team System process template includes reports to help manage the progress of project.  The onus is on the team to run - by opening them - and review them.  This is the default behaviour of the Team Foundation Server which our process template built against, however as the Team Foundation Server platform uses SQL Server Reporting Services for its reporting software, the reports can actually be pushed out to the teams via e-mail.  I have mentioned how to do this for version 2.x, and for version 1.x the same steps can be applied, with the following post:  How to E-mail the Sprint Burndown Chart to yourself or your team. For version 3.0 (For which beta 2 is now available for download from the following link: http://scrumforteamsystem.com/cs/forums/4554/ShowPost.aspx ) things are a little different. Firstly, if not already configured, the Reporting Services server will need to will need to be set up to point to an SMTP server. This can be done by usi...

Within any application lifetime management methodology, the reports are a useful tool to help see how well , or not , the project is progressing.  Within the Scrum methodology the reports which are used for tracking progress are the burndown reports.  In the Scrum for Team Systems process templates for Team Foundation Server these reports are available to help with managing the project.  With a manual run burndown report when an unexpected trend in the burndown happens, there is an option to manually add an annotation.  This would help during a retrospective when talking about why the trend oddity occurred.  Within our previous versions of the Scrum for Team System templates our burndown reports would only show the end of each days aggregated totals.  Any unexpected totals would have to investigated to understand the underlying cause.  Previously this would have involved either using Team Foundation Explorer to review the history and comments; Using ...

As mentioned in my previous blog post, there are some new reports available in the Scrum for Team System V3 Beta 1 Template. I would like to give a high level overview of the new reports as there will be full report guidance available with the template explaining in more detail how to use the reports. The new Diagnostic report isn’t really a new report, more of a spin off from another report. Version 2.x included a Version report that provided details about the status of the Team Foundation Server warehouse process. This covered information like: When the process last ran When the process finished loading data into the warehouse How often the warehouse process would run When the last time the cube was changed Team Foundation Server 2010 provides more information about the Team Foundation Server warehouse process, including: Is the warehouse blocked from running Is the OLAP processing blocked from running The last full process started and ended time The last incremental pro...

For the last few months I, with the help of fellow work colleague Kate Begley , have been working on the writing the reports for the Scrum for Team System V3 process template, which Beta 1 has been released and details are available from http://blogs.conchango.com/sfts/archive/2009/07/28/scrum-for-team-system-v3-beta-programme.aspx . There are a number of changes, from a reporting aspect, that have been introduced into Team Foundation Server 2010 platform and the Scrum for Team System V3 process template like: Warehouse schema changes; only supporting Reporting Services 2008; a sophisticated multi-team support model and new QA model. As a result the reports have been completely rewritten so there is a limited number in this beta release. However I would like to highlight some of the smaller updates that been applied to the reports to help readability / usability of the reports which are as follows: A reporting site folder structure has been created to make browsing the report...

As I have mention in a previous blog entry I’ve been heavily involved in the Scrum for Team System process template since the start of version 2 and have written the majority of the reports. I have faced, and still do, some challenges while doing this. Some of them have been around how to display the data within reporting services 2005. Now with the release of Team Foundation Server 2008 Service Pack 1, release in August, this enables Team Foundation Server 2008 to be used on a SQL Server 2008 environment. This will make some of reporting challenges I faced with reporting services 2005 disappear. This will due to major changes that been made to reporting services 2008 like Tablix control and wider Dundas chart controls. Within this release we have made a patch which will update some of the reports for reporting services 2008. This to fix some of the reporting services 2005 Patterns and Recipes which became visible. I am currently working looking at how Scrum for Team System can mak...

As I have mention in another blog posts; I’ve been heavily involved in the Scrum for Team System process template since the start of version 2 and to coincide with the release of version 2.2; I would like bring your attention to a new tool, which I help to developed, that has been added to this release. I started creating this tool due to some feedback we got from our beta users for “ TaskBoard for Team system ” tool. The request was to add a demonstration mode into the application which would show things like swimming lane-view and the following reports: Sprint burndown chart; Sprint cumulative flow as these can be view within the application. The reason for the request was create the sense of: "Look guys, this is what we are working on, and this is how we are doing", throughout the day, not only during the scrum meetings. This also happen a lot within our projects which they do something similar as well. Another reason for the tool to separate from the Task Board applic...

Continuing from my previous posted . I’d like to give an overview to the new engineering practices reports included in the Release 2.2. Builds Across a user selected time period (defaulting to the current sprint), this report shows the total builds per day broken down by status. Build Static Analysis and Compile This displays the number of Errors and Warnings either compile or static analysis the last N number of builds. Build Unit Tests Shows the total number of units test run from the last N number of builds. The total is broken down by number status of unit tests for each build. Last Build Unit Test Results This report displays the list of each test that was run for the last build and shows the result of that build. If the unit test failed it will also display the fail message as well. The last build is taken to be the last build within the data warehouse. Code Coverage This report shows the code coverage of and the total of c...

To coincide with the release of version 2.2 of Scrum for Team System, I’d like to bring your attention to the wide range of new reports included in this release. I’ve been heavily involved in the Scrum for Team System process template since the start of version 2 and have written the majority of the new reports and tweaked some of the old ones to improve performance by moving some of the querying to the TFS cube, as well as reflecting user feedback. One such fix, which can be found in release, was to the burn down report which would show a misleading (but accurate) trend line if the task data wasn’t updated on the very first day of the sprint. (This could also be fixed by making your Scrum Master work harder, but I don’t have any control over that so I decided to tweak the report instead). Most of the new reports in this release are focussed on engineering practices, which I will cover another blog post; however there is one new report specifically targeted for Scrum called the vel...