November 2004 - Posts
Ok, I just stumbled across the following on the
VSTS website. There are 2 online chats coming up on Team System, so if you are interested, go attend.
For those of you that were in the Dallas Whidbey Ascend Training, here's a summary of some of the more interesting responses to the questions we posed. For those that weren't in the training, this is just some good information about Team System (aka VSTS) - I'll try and give a bit of context:
Multiple Test Categories: One of the things we tried in class was to have a test be in multiple categories. This will be a supported feature, but does not work in the build we had for the training. In addition, the categories have been renamed to "Test Lists" This makes more sense. After all, these are just lists of test that you want to run and deal with as a group.
Relating Tests to Work Items: The question of how to relate a test to a work item was asked by one of the students. This really caught my interest. Here's the idea: all of your MANUAL tests are stored as tests in VSTS. These tests can be Word documents (as they probably are today). The tester that is working on the manual test will "execute" it within VS Team Test and be presented with an option to Pass or Fail the test. Obviously, they'll file a bug if the test fails. So the question was about taking these tests and associated them with a work item, since most test cases (outside of unit tests) are written to test some requirement of the system. This association will be done via Test View or Test Manager, by going to the properties of the test and modifying the "Work Item Associations" property.
Determining which methodology was chosen: For those of you that have worked with VSTS, one of the key values is that when you set up a Portfolio Project, you pick a methodology (MSF Complete or Agile). Work Items and documentation templates (among other things) are automatically created based on this choice. One of the students asked how to determine which methodology was chosen, when this is all done, that question will be irrelevant (it is a great question currently though) because the Portfolio, will contain the documentation (in HTML with images, etc.) of the chosen methodology. This further emphasizes the effort that the VSTS Team is putting into making it easy for development teams to know what the next steps are in their process. This is meant to help people get answers quickly and keep them productive. Cool stuff.
How a developer can work offline (and know what to work on): There is no true offline mode for work items. However, you can sync all of your work items into an excel spreadsheet (and re-sync later) and take that excel spreadsheet with you offline.
Will there be any update ability through the portal site?: It seems as though this is unlikely, but could be added after RTM or even by third parties. This would essentially custom SharePoint webparts that allowed users to enter data into Team Foundation Server. This could be bug entry, work item status changes, etc.
I've just wrapped up the Team System (VSTS) track of the Dallas Whidbey Ascend Training. It was an extremely hectic, though very fun week. Team System is the "newest' content that was being covered in the training. The training was essentially done in 3 tracks (ASP.NET, Smart Client and Team System). The attendees, all members of the Ascend program, got to pick their track. There were other miscellaneous topics as well such as 64-bit, etc. I was the trainer for VSTS track, and had a great group of students. Being that the VSTS is still very rough and not considered "beta quality", the labs were a bit rocky, as were demos.
In all, I think the attendees got a lot out of it, and even uncovered a lot of things that I hadn't discovered myself yet. Team System has a vast set of features, some of which aren't well documented at all, so being in a room full of people that were all poking at it proved very educational. The students also came up with a ton of questions that I was able to email off to the VSTS product team and get answers back. I'll be posting some of the more interesting questions and responses soon.
I owe a huge debt to Rob Caron for facilitating getting the answers from the various groups and getting them back to me so the class could get answers to their questions next-day. Thanks Rob!
On November 4th, I participated in the filming of a new TV show that MSDN TV is putting together. It's called "The Code Room". The idea is somewhat intriguing, they took three developers, gave us a task to accomplish and recorded our interactions and approach to the problem. Obviously they were looking for somewhat outgoing people, and in addition to myself,
Scott Bellware, an MVP from Austin; and Tracy Sawyer from Houston were involved. It was a lot of fun, though definitely a challenging experience. I'm not sure when it's going to be released, and I don't want to give too much away. If you do get asked to participate in future versions of this, I highly encourage it.
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