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 ...

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...