Is there any way to do this? I have looked into TFPT, Review Assistant, and the Microsoft.TeamFoundationServer.Client and Microsoft.VisualStudio.Services.Client NuGet packages. I just want something that I can create code reviews with which will display the progress of those code reviews on my team's TFS board.
No this currently cannot be done as far as I can tell, at least not without serious mucking around wit the workitem template for Code Review Request.
You may be able to achieve your goal by adding all required fields for tasks to the Code Review Request work item and adding Code Review Request to the TaskCategory, but since this work item type is tightly coupled with the UI implementation I do not know how far you could go before the UI will break.
The process is largely the same as the work required to add Bugs to the taskboard. so you could experiment with that. I suspect you may run into issues around mapping the states of the Code Review to the States of the Task workitem, which will likely break the Visual Studio UI as well.
As an alternative you could create a custom dashboard widget using a Work Item Query. It would show up on your Team's homepage on TFS and would show you your status.
Related
We are migrating from an in-house tool to Jira for managing our scrum board, and we have concerns that I have been unable to resolve by searching the Internet. But you folks are smart, right? ;-)
Our current scrum board shows the usual swim lanes across state columns (for todo, progress, review, done). Each swim lane represents a user story, and has a link to (and a snippet of) the user story description in Jira. It also has a number of 'tickets' (these would be subtasks in Jira lingo) that start in 'todo' and move across to eventually end up in 'done'.
So far, Jira can do all of this, too (although creating sub-tasks is rather a lot more work in Jira than in our in-house tool). However:
When we commit code, we include a ticket ID in the commit message, and thus each ticket displays a list of commits that were done to complete that particular ticket / partial story. I haven't been able to find out how to do this in Jira -- if it's possible at all. Instead, it seems one must open a sub-task to see if there are any commits on it?
Each commit also shows its review state, which gives us an excellent overview of how close to done a ticket really is. I haven't been able to find out how to do this in Jira -- if it's possible at all. Instead, it seems one must open the sub-task, and drill down further into Fisheye(?) in order to see the review state?
In total, our tool provides a one-screen overview of the state of each user story, ticket, commit, and review state; and it's very lightweight to pull in new stories (from Jira) and add tickets. We fear that Jira is not able to provide such a one-screen overview, forcing us to open Fisheye in order to know whether a given commit has passed review.
Is it really true that Jira must be this cumbersome?
For reference, here is what a single ticket (subtask) looks like in our system:
And if you look at the whole scrum board, it's actually quite easy to get a feel for the number of commits on individual user stories and tickets, and the ratio of pending/passed/failed code reviews:
I agree with your fears when you say
We fear that Jira is not able to provide such a one-screen overview
In my experience (7+ years with Jira/Agile) I've not seen a such condensed view of information about a sigle user story even on a swimlane with relative cards.
Also in the Atlassian marketplace there seems to be no good plugin to solve your issue, even partially.
To make such move from your in-house tool to Jira retaining all you have there, I fear you should develop a custom Plug-in using Jira SDK to integrate with the agile boards.
It may be enough to start by developing a custom field to show what you need from a "ticket" (ie sub-issue) and trying to insert it into one of the three "slots" available for cards (I mean Rapidboard card layout configuration screen).
If you wanna try, start from here.
Another option to create a new custom field would be the Adaptavist Scriptrunner plugin. It will ease the building of custom fields: your new field can be written also in Groovy rather than plain Java. I've used it to build an extended status custom field (just to give the user an immediate big picture of it) that informs him in plain english and with stylish css colors why an issue is blocked or anything else relevant, getting data from other fields or linked issues that are not immediately visible to the user. IMHO, it is very similar to your problem.
I would like to check in code after a code review is approved. I came across this stack about creating code reviews and checking in, but my question is a little different.
My issue is that I want to create a code review; however, I do not want to check in the code until it is approved. That limits me from being able to start another code review with removing related work items. What I would like to do is create code reviews and check in from the code review tab in the Team Explorer
Is that possible? It is the same principle as creating a code review after the check in, but with Code reviews and checking in. I do not want to go to pending changes and check in there because I may have removed the related items. But I do want a check in to be tied to my code review.
Unfortunately, there is no "proper" way to do what you are trying to do. You could have your working directory on a shared drive and just notify your reviewer when you are ready for them to start their review process, but that side-steps the accountability by not having each development/review iteration officially logged within TFS. This means you should check in your work and let the reviewer do their job, then continue on in that fashion to make any changes requested by the reviewer, check in, and get another code-review.
For completeness I will mention my suggestion from my comments here as well.
My suggestion would be to create a self-contained, short-lived development branch where you will do your development and have your code reviewed. Then once the development and reviewing has been completed to satisfaction, that branch can be merged back up and destroyed. This provides a much cleaner and safer approach. 1) It reduces the clutter in the history within TFS. 2) It prevents multiple unnecessary automated builds/tests/etc... from being triggered.
In your comment you suggest that this changes the "structure of your branching methods". I don't see how doing this changes anything in any way that matters. Your merge would be just like your final development check-in except that by this time all reviews have been completed and you are performing a single, clean check-in. It will still contain all of your check-in and review information, however instead of a cluttered chain of check-ins, you will have a single collapsed node which contains every single thing that was done for that particular task.
I would check with your manager, your code reviewer and/or anyone you have that is in charge of TFS and creating/maintaining your TFS policy. This approach really doesn't change anything in regard to how the rest of your process works. You would have simply abstracted your development cycle to a self-contained environment. The second you perform your merge you are right back into your normal process as you have it now.
Okay, so for documentation purposes. I did not fully understand the shelving that TFS allow me to do. After reading Shelve and Unshelve Pending Changes, it makes more sense to me. I can shelve what I am working on, unshelve the code that I have done a code review for, then check in that code. That way I can create a code review and continue working until that code review is approved. Once approved, I can go unshelve the changes and check it in.
Currently working with JIRA 5, I was looking for information about the handling Scrum in JIRA 6 with JIRA Agile (formerly Greenhopper). I saw, the there is now 3 statuses: To Do, In Progress, Done.
I find the 3 above statuses not enough. Particulary, we want to know if a story is still beeing clarified with the project owner, if is it a draft, if it has been approved by the customer. For a task, we also want to differenciate different steps in the "done" process: development done, review done, testing done, etc.
I'm looking for experience or any hints about this. My questions are: should I customize the workflow for my needs? Is there any standard workflows which already better supports Scrum? am I completly wrong and should I only use the basic concepts of JIRA for a Scrum process?
Any ideas/hints/experiences/links are welcome. Thank you.
You can customize the JIRA workflow (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Workflow) and then map the new statuses into Agile columns
In case if you already have a configured workflow go to your Agile board, go to its configuration and navigate to tab "Columns". On this screen you can add your custom column name, change its position and drag&drop status to a new column in order to map issues with this status to a column. If you use standard flow and need more customized one which better fits to your process then the link provided by mdoar above explains how to do this in details.
We're new to TFS and have some tasks set up in Team Explorer. It seems the History pane is the right/best place to add notes/discussions (although it's very different from other tools I'm used to like bugzilla, jira, redmine)?
But how can we set it up so interested parties get notified of new comments on a task, preferably by email? We're all making it up as we go along with no prior TFS experience but I'd hope my experience with other tools (the project hasn't used a proper issue tracker before) would help me figure things out but it all seems rather confusing.
If you install the TFS 2010 Power Tools (this is removed for 2012 as it's setup in the web interface according to this link although I've not played with this in 2012), under Team > Alerts Explorer you can add alerts for email notifications.
It's pretty simple, you can get alerts for when work items are modified, created under a certain path, assigned to you etc, they are basically configured in a similar way to the work item queries so it's quite easy to setup what you want.
They can be setup by any users, so you might want to let your users setup their own custom rules as they like, then you logon as a generic user (such as your admin user) to setup team specific queries, or else you might end up with users complaining about getting emails no longer relevent to them or need changing, when the user that set them up leaves/moves etc... Else you'll be hunting round to find who setup the original rules.
What is the best way to store a task for multiple users in TFS 2010 ? I can only assign one for one task.
(for example: when I plan a demo to all developers)
(this is a scrum Msf Agile project, where the task is part of a user story)
I'm sorry to tell you that you can't assign multiple users to a single work item out of the box; At the same time, I do not recommended trying as this, as it does not fit the model in TFS. The conventional / recommended way to handle this type of scenario is to create multiple tasks; one for each developer in this case. You can easily accomplish this by copying a set of tasks using MS Excel. Another option (given the example you used) is to create a "Meeting" work item that has multiple drop-downs - one for each person that would attend meetings like for a demo or a technical review.
Yet another option is to create a custom control to format and store a list of users. This would likely be relatively complex to maintain, as you have to distribute it to each user's machine (it will need to be installed locally), and last I checked you would need 2 versions; one for the Team Explorer user interface and another for the Web Access tool that most people use to create work items from a web page on their TFS server. Future updates to TFS could possibly break your custom control. It is rarely worth the effort. Another downside is the you would likely be limited by how you can use MS Excel to work with the data you store in the field that the custom control works with. If you want to look into this further you can find some examples in the following CodePlex project: http://witcustomcontrols.codeplex.com/
You might consider your true goals in tracking such things as meetings and other items you want to assign multiple people to. Tasks are the heart of tracking progress of user stories in the MSF Agile Template. Tracking meeting attendance does not typically relate directly to a User Story, for example; so it won't typically assist you to determine how much close you are to being "done" with a User Story. If you want to take advantage of the existing reports, then you should organize your tasks so that they roll up as child work items to User Story (or Bug) work items.
Short story: you can't. Work items in the Process Template of Microsoft are designed to target nobody or only one User.
Now you can customize the Process Template to change this.
Take this post for instance, the customization works for group. But I don't recommend you to do so because TFS is basically not designed for that and you may end up disappointed.