Steven Wright Blog

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...

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...

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...