I’ve been tracking Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server for some time now. For those of you who’ve been reading for a while, you’ll know I’ve been involved in trying to improve time tracking of software development. A key component of that was having a low friction work management system. Microsoft Team System is a work management system amongst other things. The friction factor is yet to be sorted out I feel.
For me, the theme of Team System is integration, integration of all tools required for development. I’ve worked in numerous places where we glued together a build system, with our version control system with our issue tracking system, with our project portal and somehow with some kind of reporting system. This hand-glued hodge-podge of systems took some of the best people away from delivering business value to working on non value-add activities. The hand-glued-integration didn’t work properly either. Often it relied on people to remember to type in issue numbers, or to do certain manual things before executing a build.. you know the story I’m sure.
Microsoft Team System tries to solve this problem. Everything is integrated with everything else. The individual components may not be the best of their type out there, but the integration is compelling. It’s the old “best-of-breed vs integrated” show down. If you’re an avid Maven fan, you probably won’t be too impressed with MSBuild. If you love Subversion, you’ll probably thing MS Source Control is a bit lame (but you won’t need a Subversion+Apache expert to make it work properly), etc.
Microsoft Team System centres on the notion of a work item. A work item is just something you track. It can be a task, or a requirement, or a risk, or an issue or anything you want. This work-item can run through any workflow you define and can be linked to anything else. This work item can be sliced and diced bi-directionally with Excel. It can be reported on by Reporting Services, because it’s automatically stored in Team Systems data warehouse. It can be linked to your source control system easily via the built in interaction. The work items are visible in the build server reports in the same way.
I’ve watched a fair amount of webcasts in the last week. I watch them on double speed because you can, and they give a pretty good overview of the offering. In the rest of this post I’ll add some context to the ones I watched so you too can share in their info. Initially, I found the link via Rob Carron’s blog who pointed me to here. I subsequently found this resource, which has some of the same ones, but new ones too. It’s a bit of a mess, but it’s possible to find quite a few webcasts. There’s also this community site which has a fair amount of short webcasts as well as much info about team system.
But let me talk through the ones that deal with work management in this post. In another post, I’ll talk about the ones that deal with the architect’s side of the equation.
The first good webcast was this one titled “Managing Work with Visual Studio 2005 Team System”. It’s an excellent intro into what you can do with work items. Closely related, but going into more detail in places is this one titled Designing a New Work Item Type Definition and Form. This shows quite some detail about building your own work item. It does this by modifying an existing one, something I’m sure you’ll want to do very soon after installing team system.
Enterprise Project Management and Reporting in Visual Studio 2005 Team System is quite a detailed looked at all the project reporting you can get. All this reporting is –already- defined for you. You don’t need to spend months extracting, formatting and reporting this data – done! This webcast also shows the bi-directional integration between excel and Team System. Dealing with Excel in other work item systems is a major pain that often involves specially formatting csv files. No more.
How and Why Process Guidance Matters in Visual Studio 2005 Team System is an overview of modifying the agile process template that they ship. This webcast shows how similar MSF is to RUP. Similar in terms of process guidance built into the developer tools and its modifiability. This other webcast shows off the same thing, I prefer this one I think.
Visual Studio 2005 Team System Extensibility: Overview I wouldn’t recommend this one really. I found it a bit simple and the example too hard and abstract.
The webcast on managing requirements shows the project portal (sharepoint) off. Sharepoint doesn’t feature much in any of the other webcasts I got to see.
tags: msf,softwaredelivery, projectmanagement
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