New Team System Stuff - 2004-11-19

Visual Studio Team System Online Chat

MSDN Online Chat : New Features in Visual Studio 2005 Team System

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System team [including yours truly] to talk about the new features in VSTS. Ask questions about and provide feedback on the new Distributed System Designers, Static and Dynamic Analysis, Code Coverage, Unit Testing, and Load and Web Testing features of Team System. Also, learn more about the new project management functionality provided by Visual Studio Team Foundation including change management, work item tracking, reporting, build automation, and integrated process guidance.

Help Help Help You

The Visual Studio Help & Community team needs your help on choosing between two design choices:

Help Choose the Whidbey Search Window Layout

In Beta2 we’ll be restoring Everett’s ability to dock the Search tool window to the bottom of the screen so you can see both search results and read documentation content on the same screen. This enabled advanced users (e.g. long-time users of Visual Studio) to skim multiple search results without having to flip back and forth between the Search tab and the documentation tab.

IDElicious

“…in a few months almost everything could be integrated in Visual Studio: IM integration, RSS Feeds, blogging support, newsgroups access, ... Add to this the Visual Studio 2005 Team System functionalities and Team Foundation, and the Visual Studio 2005 IDE will be "the" communication environment for all day work!” – David Boschman : Community Content

Analyzing Quality Metrics

In a recent post on software statistics, The Braidy Tester (Software Statistics Engineer?) had this to say:

“…metrics such as test case count and number of bugs found just aren't interesting anymore.” – The Braidy Tester : Software Statistics Engineer?

“…sifting and sorting all this information to spot trends, identify weak areas, and find ways to make life better for us and our team and our product…” – The Braidy Tester : Software Statistics Engineer?

In Visual Studio Team System, capturing and reporting many of the software project metrics people care about becomes largely automatic:

“All metrics from all tools in the Visual Studio 2005 Team System are recorded in a central data warehouse. These metrics include information about work items, check-ins, and other project related information. Using the reporting services, the project manager no longer has to spend time cross referencing metrics across tools. A lot more data is available to the project manager, providing new angles on project health.” – Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Software Project Management

and

“Because Visual Studio Project Management Tools reporting uses Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, you can analyze data in a variety of formats. The basic reports are displayed in HTML format. However, you can also view data using Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables to look into specific areas of interest. Microsoft Excel templates are provided to assist in connecting to the data warehouse and analyzing data.” – Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Software Project Management