Contents tagged with Team System

  • TRUE, True, true, and FALSE, False, false

    5 Comments

    I'm just in rant mode the last few days, trying to get my head wrapped about 3000 posts by Oren (who just happens to be an android and takes his orders from his dog) and 3000 posts on the altnetconf mailing list in the last 30 days (yes, 100 new messages a day and so many blog entries to come, somehow...)

    However this is just plain rude:

    clip_image001

    This is the XML "Intellisense" in Visual Studio 2005/2008.

    Yeah, 6 definitions of True and False.

    Let me qualify this post which I should have done in the first place. This screenshot was for an XML file in SharePoint and the options presented in Intellisense are completely driven by your XSD. So really my brain wasn't working yesterday when I blamed the IDE for this as it's only as dumb as it can be told.

    However, I guess if I was building the tool and the attribute was a boolean value I would only present two options "True" and "False" so maybe it is a deficiency of the IDE.

    Or the XSD.

    Or SharePoint.

    Or me.

    All of the above? Yeah, probably.

  • Scrum for Team System Tips

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    As I'm staring at my blank Team System setup waiting for the system to work again, I thought I would share a few Scrum for Team System tips with you. SFTS has done a pretty good job for us (much better than the stock templates Team System comes with) but it does have it's issues and problems (like the fact that PBIs are expressed in days and SBIs are expressed in hours, totally messes up with the Scrum concept and makes PMs try to calculate "hours per point"). I'm really digging Mingle though and will be blogging more on that as we're piloting it for a project right now and I'm considering setting up a public one for all of my projects (it's just way simpler than Rally, VersionOne or any other Agile story management tool on the planet, hands down). 

    So here's a few tips that I’ve picked up using Scrum for Team System that might be helpful to know (should you or any of your Agile force be put in this position):
    • When a sprint ends, all outstanding PBIs should be moved to the next sprint and the sprint marked as done.
    • The amount of work done in the sprint (SBIs completed) gives you the capacity (velocity) for the team for the next sprint.
    • Only allocate one sprints-worth of PBIs to a sprint when planning and try to estimate better based on previous sprint data.
    • When the customer decides the product is good enough for shipping have a release sprint where the goal is to "mop up" bugs and polish the product ready for shipping. This would include new PBIs like:
      • Fix outstanding bugs
      • Create documentation
      • Package/create MSIs
    • Never attach new SBIs to previously closed PBIs. If the customer changes his mind about the way something is implemented, it is recorded as a new PBI because the requirement has changed.

    Definitions:

    PBI: Product Backlog Item, can be functional requirements, non-functional requirements, and issues. Comparable to a User Story, but might be higher level than that (like a Theme, depends on how you do Scrum)

    SBI: Sprint Backlog Item, tasks to turn Product Backlog Items into working product functionality and support a Product Backlog requirement for the current Sprint.

  • Previously on Fear and Loathing...

    2 Comments

    Bil was struggling with the question. What would you rather have? No source control or no tests.

    Let's go back a bit to Friday morning when Bil came into the office to find himself alone (it was 5:30AM and what ungodly soul would be at work at that time?) and unable to connect to the Team Foundation Server. It seems the drive that contained the database files filled up. Oh it gets better. No only did the data drive fill up (and BTW, the data files AND log files were on the same drive, not the way I would have set things up) but (drumroll please...) no backups. Somewhere along the way the SQLAGENT was disabled and frankly, when it's disabled nothing really works, including backups. As the data drive filled up, the transaction logs filled up and eventually became corrupted, unreadable, and unrecoverable.

    The short of it that I'm left with a Team Foundation Server and it's databases with no log files. Not the end of the world (at least I don't think so) and there are techniques for re-mounting a file without the associated .ldf file. Grant you, if there were any transactions in play they would be lost, but this was the morning and the drive filled up sometime throughout the night (probably during a build).

    At this point we've tried a variety of things to restore the databases and strangely enough we got them all back online. All but one. TfsVersionControl is the table that (yup) holds all the source code for Team System projects. A single table that just refuses to restore. The single remount trick (which worked for all of the other databases) doesn't work for this one (of course) so we're turning to PSS to help us fix this. There are a couple of "hacks" where you rebuild the database and swap out the data, but again for some reason it won't work. The best and closest we got was getting TfsVersionControl back online, but checking a solution out (any solution) ends with an error about "downloadUrl" being null, and the checkout stops.

    So tune in again tommorow as the geek suffers. We'll see how things go, but as a last ditch effort we do have the latest code on the build server (a separate box) which has the latest checkout so we technically *could* rebuild the projects, we would just lose source control history which in the grand scheme of things, isn't the worst thing in the world.

  • eScrum, part deux

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    Microsoft has come out with an update to what I consider their Gong Show release of eScrum. The new version (v1.0 as opposed to v1, go figure) has the following fixes:

    • MSI to provide a prerequisites separately during installation
    • Provided start menu link to documentation, to locate Help 
    • Provided choice to install only the process template, and/or the web application 
    • Rebuilt with latest Ajax Control Library Version 
    • Automated copy of XSS library in MSI
    • Automated creation and configuration of application pool and website in MSI
    • Automated upload of process template in MSI
    • Automated share point template setup in MSI
    • Automated creation/configuration of cache and log paths in MSI

    There are still some manual steps involved but it's a vast improvement and it all sounds good, I just can't tell you first hand right now if it's all it's cracked up to be.

    You can download the package from here.

  • TFS vs. Open Source, the battle rages on

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    Caught a thread between Roy Osherove and Oren Eini that has gone back and forth a few times, all about Team Foundation Server and open source tools (and the deficencies Oren points out in TFS).

    The discussion has been (mostly) centered around source control, however I think they're both missing on the main feature of TFS. That is extensibility.

    Yes, other packages out there are extensible by nature (Subversion for example) but require coding, architectural changes, hooking into events, all of which are nice but systems like this were not designed for it. Was subversion really designed at the start to be extensible so I could maybe have my storage be in a relational database rather than the file system?

    TFS by it's very nature was built around extensions. The Work Item itself is just a container, defined by the fields, rules, and relationships you create in the process template. There is no "default" Work Item. There is no concept of a "bug" or "feature" in TFS. It's just a Work Item and can be morphed into whatever you need it to be. Just look at the Conchago guys with Scrum for Team System, and how they turned Work Items into sprint and product backlog items and even through in a sprint retrospective item.

    I was asked recently if we could modify the bug template so we could track the steps to reproduce. I said we could use the description field, but decided to build out a new type of Work Item (using Joel's very excellent Process Template Editor) so that you could create a work item (a bug) and add as many steps to reproduce and and expected behavior field for kickers. The entire process took me an hour (and that included about 15 minutes to grok the templates as I've never done this before).

    I've tried these type of things on other systems and they're painful. Sure, some systems are quite helpful in adding new fields, changing the layout, etc. but none are things that you can add entire concepts that are new, not just net new (there is a difference). Could I crack open subversion to support a way to link checkins to an external feature list? Sure. Why would I when TFS has this already.

    As for modifying open source systems to do your bidding, you enter into a fork scenario. Unless the system supports a plug-in pattern and you can just add a new assembly (like say oh the TFS policy sub-system) I really can't do much with a tool even if I have the source code, unless I want to run the risk of being in a maintenance nightmare from Hell scenario. Do I really want to do diffs of new relases of NUnit with my own code to support new extensions.

    Luckily there are some open source systems that are built around an extensibility model but so is TFS. And while it might have deficiencies in various places I can plug in new features or introduce entirely new concepts to the repository so that I can make it match whatever business process I use.

    Is the source control system in Team Foundation Server extensible or replaceable? No, but I'm willing to live with a few problems while we get to version 3.0.

  • 3 Team System Goodies

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    Stumbled over 3 different goodies for Team System and CodePlex that will be very valuable to me. Hopefully these will be useful to you too.

    CodePlex Source Control Client

    This is a command line tool which allows users to work offline (in the "edit-merge-commit" fashion). It's not as full featured as what you can get from the web experience or Visual Studio, but will help doing quick edits. This is the initial release so expect a few issues and bugs out of the gate but it does give us something that we can't get from Visual Studio, anonymous access. So non-developers on a project can pull down the source code with the command line client. Next up should be a Tortoise-like interface that will make it even easier to use (but I can dream can't I?)

    Team System Prescriptive Guides

    This is a plethora of whitepapers, best practices, videos and standards that you can just use in your organization if you're using Team System. No mess, no fuss. Contains guidance on structuring your solutions, custom check-in policies, branching, and migrating from VSS. Very handy!

    Web Access for Team System

    This is probably the biggest surprise as I didn't see it coming (but then I'm asleep half the time). MS aquired a company that makes a web based client for accessing Team System (TeamPrise) so now they've got a web client for accessing Team Systems (should work with CodePlex but I haven't tried it yet). Best of all, it's free! Great for non-Windows clients accessing Team Systems if that's useful for you.

    And I haven't even got through all my feeds yet!

  • Fixing Product Backlog items in Scrum for Team System

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    For those of us who use Conchango's process guidance package for Visual Studio Team System, Scrum for Team System, life is good. Scrums are easy to track, burndown charts are cool to put up on the wall, and it's a breeze to see immediately where you are anywhere anytime. However there's been some rumblings with the tool for awhile but Conchango has come to the rescue with a fix.

    The problem reared it's ugly head for me a month or two ago. I would look at the reports and whatnot on how much work remaining (in hours) there was on our Product Backlog Items (PBIs) for a given sprint. In our case, we had 600 hours left (which seemed about right). However when I looked at all the Sprint Backlog Items (SBIs) and totalled the hours remaining on the tasks, it only came to about 450 hours. This wasn't right and was really affecting our burndown charts and general feel of how much work was left before the sprint ended. Basically the work remaining in a PBI is inconsitent with the total work remaining for all the linked SBIs.

    It is possible in “normal operation” for this to happen. The following are the most likely causes of this behaviour:

    1. Where a SBI is unlinked from a PBI and the SBI still had work remaining prior to being unlinked. Please reduce the Work Remaining to 0 and save prior to unlinking.
    2. Where an SBI is marked as deleted (v1.0, v1.1). This would not cause resynchronisation, and this can be resolved by installing Scrum for Team System 1.2. 
    3. Where load conditions on the server cause the “eventing service” to timeout, the work remaining in this case would not be updated.
    4. Where a PBI Work Remaining is edited from within Excel (unfortunately using the Excel add-in for TFS has the potential to overwrite a “read only” field).

    After some discussion in the forum and a bit of testing of their tool, my problem is fixed. The command line tool is called the "Scrum Consistency Check" and will identify and resynchronize the work remaining on any project in your Team System that you think might be "out of sync".

    It's a command line tool, but you run it from anywhere. The syntax for the tool is:

    ScrumConsistencyCheck.exe [server] [project] [refresh (true|false)]

    The server is your TFS server name. The project is what project you want to interrogate/update. The refresh is if you want to perform the update or just get a report of what the status is.

    Here's a sample output from one of my projects that was suffering:

    Check.exe myserver "BRMS" false
    Server: myserver
    Project: BRMS
    Refresh out-of-sync PBI's: false
    Number of PBI's in Team Project: 228
     
    Inconsistent backlog items:
    PBI 273, Work Remaining: 8 hours, Children: 13
            Inconsistent work remaining, difference: -8 hours
            SBI: 772, Sprint: 5 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 756, Sprint: 4 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 748, Sprint: 0 State: Not Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 346, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 282, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 281, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 280, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 279, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 278, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 277, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 276, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 275, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 274, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
    PBI 678, Work Remaining: 12 hours, Children: 2
            Inconsistent work remaining, difference: -12 hours
            SBI: 869, Sprint: 4 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 709, Sprint: 4 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
    PBI 235, Work Remaining: 2 hours, Children: 6
            Inconsistent work remaining, difference: -2 hours
            SBI: 396, Sprint: 3 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 321, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 320, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 319, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 318, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
            SBI: 317, Sprint: 2 State: Done, Work Remaining: 0 hours
    PBI 676, Work Remaining: 16 hours, Children: 0
            Inconsistent work remaining, difference: -16 hours
    PBI 998, Work Remaining: 4 hours, Children: 0
            Inconsistent work remaining, difference: -4 hours
    PBI 220, Work Remaining: 59 hours, Children: 0
            Inconsistent work remaining, difference: -59 hours
     
    Hours lost (less in PBI than SBI): 0
    Hours lost (less in SBI than PBI): 106
     
    Finished!  Press <enter> to continue.

    Once you run the tool and pass in "true" to refresh the out-of-sync PBIs you should see this:

    Check.exe myserver "BRMS" false

    Server: myserver
    Project: BRMS
    Refresh out-of-sync PBI's: false

    Number of PBI's in Team Project: 228

    Inconsistent backlog items:

    Hours lost (less in PBI than SBI): 0
    Hours lost (less in SBI than PBI): 0

    Finished!  Press <enter> to continue.

    You can download the tool from here. For support of the tool, please use the forum here. Hope this helps!

  • Lies TFS Told Me

    2 Comments

    This morning we suffered an air-conditioner failure in one of the server rooms. As our TFS server was deployed to a server with the words "dev" in it, naturally they thought they could just shut it down. After all, dev means development so it's not critical. I don't blame them however it caused a few issues. This one was shared to me by one of my developers so hopefully it'll help some of you out there in TFS land.

    So apparently if the TFS server goes down while you're working on a file Visual Studio will allow you to work on the file locally. Makes sense. However, while editing the file, the server does not know that you have updated the file. Thus, when you reconnect to the server (or in this case the server comes back from the dead) TFS doesn't realize the file has been modified and will not save the changes to the repository when you complete a check-in.

    To get TFS to check-in the modified file you must specifically go to each of the modified files and select Check Out for Edit. Then, select None - Allow shared checkout and click the Check Out button from the Check Out dialog that appears. Finally, check-in (commit) the files back to the source repository. 

    The one other symptom is that your local files are not set to read-only like all other files when you try to update from the repository (Get Latest Version).

    Something to watch out for in case your server goes bye-bye in mid-development.