Deep Dive into TFS Reporting

If you haven’t used the reporting capabilities of Team Foundation Server (TFS) then you’ve certainly been missing a big piece of the product. There are standard reports but more importantly you have the ability to customize and extend those reports as well as create your own. Steve Borg, Principal ALM Consultant from Northwest Cadence had a great presentation (Deep Dive into Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Reporting) at TechEd 2011 that illustrated how to use both the built-in and ad hoc report capabilities to find the current status of your project along with predicting your project’s probability of success or failure along several axes. Steve also examined the behind-the-scenes data stores: the TFS_Warehouse and the OLAP cube to better clarify their purpose.

One particular interesting section is the explanation of Excel pivot-table reports and how to host them on a SharePoint portal. If your business users are entrenched in Excel, this is the segment to watch closely.