58.6. Reporting and Business Intelligence

TFS uses Report Server, which is part of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, to provide useful information for project managers, customers, and developers. Reports can be accessed directly from Team Explorer, the reports site (http://mytfs/reports/), SharePoint, or Team System Web Access, or they can be configured as a subscription from the Reports site to be left in a Windows fileshare or sent through e-mail.

The great benefit these have is that developers can focus on their work instead of manually filling out reports. All the information is collected during their daily work, checking out and checking in code, fixing bugs, and relating what they are doing to work items. This way project managers and stakeholders can get to the information they need from the reports TFS provides.

Each process template provides its own set of reports. The CMMI version provides three additional reports and templates like Scrum for Team System from Conchango, and has reports appropriate for the Scrum methodology like Delta Report and Burndown Charts. Again, we will focus on MSF for Agile Development here.

Some of the reports included are Actual Quality vs. Planned Velocity, Bug Rates, Bugs by Priority, Bugs Found Without Corresponding Tests, Quality Indicators, Remaining Work, Regressions, and Test Failing With and Without Active Bugs. Figure 58-24 shows how the work has been resolved over a couple of years and how much work is left. In the report you can filter by dates, work item type, iteration, and area. You can export to XML, CSV, TIFF, PDF, Web, and Excel.

You don't need two years of information to get useful reports. Depending on the nature of the data displayed, you might not see anything at the beginning. For example, the Test Failing reports will need to have at least one test in your MSBuild project, or to have data for the Regressions report you need Passing tests that are now failing. Similarly, the Scenarios Details report will need you to register at least a Scenario Work Item. After a couple of iterations of working with TFS you will have a lot of useful metrics for free.

Figure 58.24. Figure 58-24