We are currently trying to find a new bug tracking and integration software and we were looking at FogBugz, Jira and TFS. My question is about TFS.
I have done some research and found that TFS has "Power Tools" in which Non IT users can log on and get some information, but all the examples and tools I have found didnt really give them the kind of UI that other bug tracking software provides such as estimates, full fledged reporting on hours, P&L, Bugs Released, When A feature will be complete. For example Fogbugz has a feature that will predict when a feature will go live off past estimates, is there any way to get that kind of functionality from TFS? Or Any of the functionality listed above in a web interface?
Team Web Access is built into TFS 2010 (grab a trial and try)
Urban Turtle is the best Web UI for dealing with Work Items in TFS.
Reporting and Bug reports are available, though everyone, everywhere wants something different.
P&L reports are not available out of the box.
There are minimal prediction reports, but it's all BS anyways :). Burndown reports give you information about your likelihood to delivery.
As you mention, there is a tool called Team System Web Access Power Tool with following features:
* Direct links to work items, query results, diffs, change sets and more
* Display custom controls on work item forms
* View queued builds new, queue new builds
* Add new work items or edit existing ones
* Work with any type of work item, including custom ones
* Add new work item queries or edit existing ones
* View, download, upload, check-in and check-out documents on SharePoint team portal
* View reports, export as PDF or Excel
* Browse source control repositories, download files, view changesets, diffs, histories, and annotated views
* View build results, start or stop builds
* Search for keywords in work items
If you need more than that you'll have to integrate the TFS with SharePoint server which will give you all you asked for in your question and much more...
Related
Just like the title says, I would like to know if there is any way in TFS 2013 Update 4 to query a whole week-long activity for a certain User (a team member of a certain project) across multiple projects.
An example scenario will be as follows :
User_A is a team-member in Project_1, Project_2, and Project_3.
On Day_1, he performs some work in Project_1 (development : 2 hours, testing 1 hour). He also performs another work in Project_2 (bugfixing : 3 hours).
On Day_2, he continues his work in Project_2 (bugfixing : 2 hours). And then due to some circumstances, he is required to solve an urgent issue in Project_3 (3 hours).
And so on until Day_5, shifting back and forth through multiple projects.
Now, our PM would like to know the details of his work during this week (from Day_1 until Day_5).
Is it possible to generate data, perhaps through a query in TFS Web Access to aggregate data for
User_A in a given timespan ?
Thanks.
There are a number of questions in here and I will try my best to answer them all:
Query Across Team Project in Web Access
First, you can query in Web Access across multiple Projects by just removing the "Team Project" part of the query.
You can even create charts based on this data...
However for anything more complicated you should use the built in Reporting Services tool and the Data warehouse that comes with TFS. If you don't have it installed then you can add it.
http://nakedalm.com/integrate-reporting-and-analyses-services-with-team-foundation-server-2013/
This will gave you access to much more powerful reporting but it is much more complicated to configure. You get a cube (multi-dimensional data) and a warehouse (lists) that you can query to your hearts content both across team project and across collections.
Time Tracking in TFS
TFS is an effort management system and is not good at time management. While you can get a query to show you the amount of time applied to a Task you can tell when that time was applied without some serious giggery pokery. In TFS (well the MSF templates anyway) you store "Remaining", "Completed", and "Original Estimate".
So today I have a task that I completed 4 hours and tomorrow it will have a value of 8 hours in the completed field.
So did I complete 8 today? No, I only added 4.
What if I decided that it was only 3 the day after I entered the data? Can I fix it? No,
I could go on and on with the issues and caveats for trying to track time in TFS, however, if we just assume that it is not possible (or at least more effort than it is worth) then we are left with finding another solution. (Yes, I know there are third party tools that plug onto TFS and do time sheets or other stupid stuff, but they all have issues.)
I recommend tracking course grained time against a Project in a tool is separate from TFS, that is designed to collect this information. I have used Harvest and Freshbooks but there are other time sheeting systems out there. Do not integrate it with TFS. I have never once seen that work effectively and there is no value in it.
Is there value in tracking time - Not actually asked but it goes to the crux of the issue
The only demonstrable value I have ever seen in collecting time sheets is a) if you are billing your customers for that time, or b) you need to understand capex vs opex against a project. If both are true then a simple Project in Harvest with two tasks, one for Feature work and one for Maintenance work, will be sufficient and way simpler to manage.
I need to build query, that return result with network topology with more than 2 level in depth. For example, i wont to get next result:
but if i build "Work Items and Direct Links" query i get only 1 level depth, and if i build "Tree of Work Items" i can select onl Parent/Child type of tree and can't add my custom Successor/Predecessor type of tree.
So my direct question: may i get more then one level depth in Work Items and Direct Links Query, or change type of tree in "Tree of Work Items" Query? Or i can get that result only by integrating TFS with Project Server like this?
There are two ways to do what you are talking about and it depends if you want to create reporting or if you are talking about a work breakdown structure.
If you require a work breakdown structure I would recommend changing your process so that you do not, or processing that purely at the PMO level. Enshrining dependencies in a tool at anything lower than the Portfolio suggests to me that you may be creating solutions to effects rather than getting to the route cause of a particulate dysfunction that is enshrined in your culture.[preachMode=false] However...
#1 - Reporting
You can create a reporting services report that presents data from both the Data Warehouse and the Cube to create the desired view.
Create and Manage Reporting Services Reports for Visual Studio ALM
This will give you a read-only view of data and will lead to the least invasive dysfunctions.
#2 - MS Project
You can use MS Project to load both the Parent/Child & Network items and maintain the Gant Chart with dependencies that are stored in TFS.
I could not find a good link but there is documentation on MSDN
This will give you an interactive view of the data in the operational store, but will lead to the most invasive dysfunctions.
#3 - Project Server
If you are implementing something more like the Scaled Agile Framework then you may want to take advantage of the Earned Value management of Project Server integration as well as some of the Portfolio Management features.
Enable Data Flow Between Team Foundation Server and Microsoft Project Server
I hope that you can find something to suit and you get a chance to explore the ramification of your current process on the ability of your teams and organisation to achieve any sort of agility in the new normal of the modern application lifecycle.
I'm looking for a work-item-tracking/bug-tracking system (or JIRA plugin, or TFS plugin, or...) which makes it easy to stack-rank work items without having to manually assign priority values to each work item.
Instead, our team wants to be able to see a list of open work items and be able to drag-n-drop one or a multiple selection of work items until the order matches the team's prioritization. This would be much easier than arguing about priority numbers and dealing with ties (e.g. "which of the 5 bugs marked priority=2 should I work on today?").
Our team is considering switching work-item-trackers (we use Gemini now) and availability of a good drag-n-drop prioritizer is high on our requirements list.
I realize drag-n-drop ranking is non-trivial because no team will stack rank all work items. Instead, we'll want to take a subset (e.g. work items for one sprint sprint or iteration, or bugs assigned to one developer) and stackrank those, then later look at a different subset and stackrank those, etc. And I'm sure we'll sometimes need to mix and match different stacks, so there'd need to be heuristics (ideally configurable) about how to show a stack of items previously stacked separately.
Pivotal Tracker is close to the drag-n-drop UI I'm thinking of from a UI perspective, but Pivotal's model of separating user stories from the underlying work items (plus a few other issues) doesn't match how we want to work. We don't want to have to deal with different artifacts (stories vs. JIRA/BugZilla work items)-- instead we just want a drag-n-drop UI to automatically fill out a "priority" field in the issue tracker, and which we can use later when sorting and filtering. And we wouldn't want to use Pivotal as our only work item tracker, because it seems to lack common features like bulk editing which are critical for large projects.
Anyone know of a tool like what I describe above?
Urban turtle is the best TFS add-on, making ranking/prioritizing a sane activity. Priority by number is a disaster so don't think you're alone there.
http://urbanturtle.com/
Urban Turtle is updated every month and used by quite a few teams including a number of my teams.
Eylean Board has what you are looking for. They offer a task board where the tasks are prioritized by moving them around, the priority tasks being on top. Interface is nice and clean and they offer other features such as integration with TFS, reports, etc.
The greenhopper plugin for JIRA has this feature. It's worked well for me ...though I'm not a big fan of JIRA in general.
http://www.atlassian.com/software/greenhopper/tour/backlog-management.jsp
Previous to this, I just used excel.
One of the best (and fastest) web UI's I've seen is on AgileZen, which supports something similar to this. Last I knew it did not have built-in integration with TFS, but it does have a REST API. It's basically a web-based, shareable Kanban board.
In TFS when I setup a new iteration, I start out by creating "Requirement" work items, which are then associated with multiple child "Task" work items. On the task work items I put the estimate for the task and then as the task is worked on the completed and remaining hours are updated.
What I want is an excel report that will show a breakdown of iteration, requirements, and task, with the hours totaled at the requirement and iteration level.
I envision this to be some kind of pivot table but I can't figure out how to pull in the data so I can relate it.
There is no rollup available out of the box in TFS 2010. You could write a macro in Excel to calculate the rollup hours and pivot on that.
You could also use the SSRS report User Story Overview to see the value, but that value is delayed (which is probably not what you want).
You could also take a look at the Project Server Integration CTP, which has the rollup feature.
If instead of Excel, you use an Agile planning web application for TFS such as Urban Turtle, you will obtain rollup feature at the requirement and iteration level.
According to Microsoft, the premier Agile tooling for TFS is Urban Turtle. Discloser: I work with the Urban Turtle team. So do not take my words. Instead, read what Brian Harry, who is the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server, said about Urban Turtle: "...awesome Scrum experience for TFS." You can read Brian Harry's blog here
So far, I've been using TFS only as task management, but never as an time report nor ticketing system. I've been using third party software for each. I want to use more out of TFS if possible to include these reports too.
Is TFS able to handle ticketing system good?
And what about time reports?
What templates can I use for these reports?
Is it be ok to give customer access to TFS to add bug reports?
First of all, any of the work items can be customized. Secondly, in many cases, someone probably has done so already.
I would think it would be good for this. Consider that it already has the ability to have a bug filed against software; have it assigned to a developer; and to record when it's fixed. The Bug work item already keeps track of time (if you fill that in).
I'm not certain about allowing customers in. I suggest you look in to the Web Access for that. You might have to maintain actual Domain accounts for the customers.
Our TFS is one mother-ship where we have our source repository, do our automatic builds/CI, manage our Product and Sprint backlog items (dev task items), and manage bugs - like you would using any full scale bug tracking system like bugzilla or jira (if that is what you meant by a 'ticketing system' - if by ticketing system you meant something like BMC Remedy, then its a different ballgame).
Our firm follows agile methodology and we use Conchango Templates which in my opinion is great for agile shops. Its highly customizable and is easy to learn/follow. As far as reports are concerned, these templates generate reports per day, per project, per team, per person by month, year and all that jazz... depends on what you really want.
Regarding giving customers access, it totally depends on your and your network admins comfort level.
Hope this helps...