Welcome back once again, in part 1 of what is new in VS TFS 2011 I talked about the offering from a developers perspective, in part 2 of what is new in VS TFS 2011 I talked about the offering from a Testers and Business Analysts perspective. In this blog post I’ll be discussing the new features available for Project Managers and TFS Administrators.
One thing that project Managers loved about TFS 2010 was the linking of work items, see work structured by category i.e. testers having their own tasks, developers having their own tasks, but in the end everything rolls up to link to the original requirement, then being able to extract data in to their funky excel sheets make updates, generate reports from the rich out of the box available reports and push the data back to TFS. Those who were lucky to have Project Server Integration with TFS enjoyed the complete end to end workflow. TFS 2010 also made available sprint planning and triage workbooks, this really simplified resource planning and sprint tracking. But two things project managers complained the most about, “why do I have to wait for the TFS warehouse to process before i can see my burn down reports?” and “sprint planning and tracking needs a web interface, excels just become unmanageable with project teams spread across geographies.”
Team Foundation Administrators on the other hand also had a long wish list but a common theme across all wish lists was being able to manage security, groups, membership and permissions from a central place. Though over the course open source tools such as TFS Admin helped you manage group membership and permissions across projects, team sites and reporting services from one place. Microsoft heard it loud and clear and has great offerings in TFS 2011 that simplify project planning, tracking & delivery and simply project administration as well.
Something worth mentioning is that the new Team web site has been built using MVC and JQuery, it significantly reduces the number of server round trips the old team site had to do to get you the information you asked for. Since most of the calls to the server are asynchronous and a lot of the processing is done at the client side the experience is superb! It was due to the lack of such an experience in Team Web site in TFS 2010 that ALM sprint management tools offered by Urban Turtle, Telerik and TeamPulse really gained momentum, but that experience is being offered natively now and what more there is great simplification is extending the provided dashboards.
And a centralized security Administration. No tools required to be installed, the experience offered right from the browser.
Further Reading
1. TFS Web site in Action - http://geekswithblogs.net/TarunArora/archive/2011/09/16/tfs-azurendashtechnical-access-preview-experience.aspx
2. ALM - http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/TOOL-833T
3. Agile Team Management - http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/TOOL-793T
4. Taking ALM to the cloud - http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/TOOL-818T
5. An Introduction to ALM in TFS 2011 - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/06/14/agile-project-management-in-visual-studio-alm-v-next.aspx
In Summary,
When vNext was previewed the 1st time back at Tech-ed North America 2011.
The announcement was around,
- Enhanced User Experience
- Agile Planning Tools
- Lightweight Requirements
- Stakeholder Feedback
- Code Review Features
- Continuous Integration
- Agile Quality Assurance
and was summarized and demonstrated using the picture you see below. And boy, one year down in the preview this holds true! Product Back log Manager shapes the product backlog, sprints are planned and tracked using the web agile planning tools. Requirements and Mock ups are captured using Storyboarding, Visual Studio 2011 enhances the developer productivity and allow developers to churn requirements into working product while making use of Continues Integration, Code Reviews amongst other best practices, stakeholders review the developing software which is fed back and results in a solution that works and does what the customer needs it to do. Once the software makes it to production, it is tracked using SCOM 2012 and hard to reproduce issues are fixed using IntelliTrace in production, new bugs and requirements make their way back to the product backlog and the cycle continues. And being able to do this on premise and from the cloud makes TFS 2011 a great preposition.
With this we have completed the Lap around TFS 2011 covering the new offering from the developers, testers, Business Analysts, Project Managers and TFS Administrators point of view. Microsoft has done a fantastic job with TFS 2011. If you have any recommendations on things that we could add to this or any questions or feedback, feel free to add to this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora.
Next I’ll be working on setting up a scaled out Dev11 environment which consists of TFS11, VS11, Build Controller, Agents, Test Controller, Agents, SCOM 2012, Project Server and Lab Management.
Stay tuned in for more!
Cheers, Tarun