Steven Wright Blog

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 ...

I have been working with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, since its first release, within many of my projects.  One of the biggest tasks, that I find with writing a report is the testing the reports and making sure the data that is displayed is correct.  My method of developing and testing reports is as follows: Write the queries, outside Reporting Services, for creating the report data set(s) with the parameters defined which will be configured within the report. Define the parameters that report data set would create and assign a valid value. Execute the queries. Inspect the results to make sure that they meet the expected results. Repeat with a new valid value or fix any issues. After one or two or even three passes that have worked then I take the queries and put them into report data sets. Then I define the report layout. Then I preview the report make sure it’s still correct Then I release to our te...

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 Scrum for Team System project I have been focusing on the reports; I came across an issue which was due to the way the Reporting Services 2008 "automatic upgrade" feature upgraded our reports. The Scrum for Team System template contains over 20 reports all written for Reporting Services 2005. This was done because Team Foundation Server 2008 only worked on SQL Server 2005 and Reporting Services 2005. Then in August of 2008 Team Foundation Server 2008 Services Pack 1 was released which added support for the Team Foundation Server 2008 is to run on SQL Server 2008 platform. With Reporting Services 2008 there is a new reporting definition language schema. However reporting services does have backward compatibility method as describe below: The report server will validate report definition file against the included reference to the RDL namespace which specifies the version of the report definition schema that is used. The report is automatically upgraded the first...

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...

I have been working on Scrum for Team System focusing on the reporting functionality of this tool.  One of the things I looked at was to get the reports delivered to me by e-mail.  I went looking to see if there was an interface via the Team Explorer interface, to which I found quickly there wasn’t.  However because TFS uses Reporting Services I knew that I could use Reporting Services subscriptions functionality.  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 using the Reporting Services configuration tool and updating the e-mail settings within this tool.   You can find this tool on your TFS server under the following: Start Menu > All Programs > Microsoft SQL Server 2005 > Configuration Tools To create the subscription you need to use the Report Manager  (to gain access to this you can right mouse click on the report folder within the t...