Community TFS Report Extensions Version 1 Released

Last year Steve St. Jean and myself did some extensive work creating custom reports for a joint client of ours. The client was a large company well into an enterprise adoption of Scrum and other Agile practices. The reports we made them ranged from a set that helped make the testing efforts and work in progress in each Sprint more visible to multiple views of their Release Plan and its allocation of work to support software capitalization.

The client was gracious enough to give its permission for us to remove any of their proprietary material and release them to the public. Thus the Community TFS Report Extensions project on Codeplex was born.

We are happy to announce our first release of the report pack that includes our first two reports:

Test Plan Status Report 

The Test Plan Status is a report that extends the functionality found in the Test tab of Microsoft Test Manager.  While Test Manager can show you the completion status of the selected Test Suite, it does not show roll-up information when you have a hierarchy of suites.  This report is intended to fill that gap.

Release Plan Report

The Release Plan report shows the Product Backlog sorted by priority and overlaid with which sprint the items are forecasted to be delivered based on a given velocity. Only backlog items that have an effort, priority, and are in a valid state are included. Optionally you can specify a deadline which will appear before the Sprint it would fall during so you can see what items are forecasted to be completed by that date.

This initial release supports TFS 2010 and the MSF Agile 5.0 and MS Scrum 1.0 process templates (the Test Plan Status Report also support the CMMI template). We will be adding more reports in the near future along with updates to the current release with support for 2012 and some extensions.

Please take a look at the project and give us your feedback so we can continue to make these reports better. If you are interested in contributing, please let us know. The more the merrier!

New Product Backlog Estimation History Report for Conchango Scrum TFS Template

Paul Gauthier and I were talking about using more of the information stored in the Team System data warehouse for the "inspect and adapt" aspects of most Agile practices. If you use TFS for managing your Product/Sprint Backlogs, associate source control changesets to Sprint Backlog Items, and use Team Build then you have a wealth of information about your process at your fingers. There are some great reports out of the box with the Conchango Scrum for TFS process template, but there is so much more data to be mined.



Paul's team is just starting with Scrum and we have had many conversations about estimating User Stories in the Product Backlog using Story Points. Most of the groups I coach have to get used to the idea of estimating this way. I always tell them that over time your team will become more accurate with gauging the story point value of individual stories. We talked about being able to go back over time and see how many hours were actually worked against individual stories and using that data to get an idea of how much diversity there are in the actual hours worked over multiple stories assigned the same story point value.



Paul created the great report we are calling "Product Backlog Estimation History". You choose a story point value and a date range, then the report will show you a graph of the number of Product Backlog Items with the same amount of actual hours worked.


Over time you can see trends in how accurate your team is estimating using story points by seeing the variation of hours actually worked. If you see a large variation then you might want to look at this during a retrospective to see why the estimates are no more accurate. You will see some degree of variation naturally, but large amounts can be a symptom of a deeper issue.

Reformatted Product Backlog Composition Report for Conchango TFS Template

There are some great reports that come out of the box with the Conchango Scrum process template for TFS, but I have always had an issue with the formatting of the Product Backlog Composition report.

This report is a great breakdown of each Sprint showing the Product Backlog Items and all the associated Sprint Backlog items. It shows the story points assigned to each Product Backlog Item as well as the original estimated hours versus the hours remaining for each of the subsequent Sprint Backlog items. This is a good report for management that want to see what items are being worked on in the Sprint and now muck work remains to be done. Project managers used to more traditional reporting seem to like it also.

I had a few of issues with the report that comes with the template:

• The Story Points for each Product Backlog Item line up on top of the column for the Sprint Backlog Item's original estimated hours. This makes it look like the total of those hours, which of course it isn't.



• There is a total for the hours remaining for the Sprint Backlog Items, but it is at the top of the column next to the Story Points for the Product Backlog Item. This also leads to the misconception that the Story Points are the total for the original estimates. I also would expect the totals to be at the bottom of the columns, not at the top.



• The rows are separated using alternating row colors, but I rarely print the report with colors so the rows run together.

Paul Gauthier, who works at one my clients, created a new version that addresses the issues above. Click here to download the version Paul has reformatted.

Paul is working on a few other reports that I have had in mind for a while but could not find the time to create (plus I do not know very much about SQL Reporting Services). I'll post those soon.