Visual Studio Team System Experts Chat

I attended and enjoyed the Microsoft Team System chat today that Brian Harry has been touting on his blog.  It was packed full of genuinely good information, not at all just a bitch-fest or we-are-great affair.  I particularly enjoyed the honesty of “No.  That isn’t going to happen,” that came about a few times.

Although you can read the entire transcript of the chat here, I copied and pasted my favorite takeaways from the chat here to distill for our team the things that will be most relevant for us.  I was very impressed with the sheer volume of answers and the fact that all of my questions were answered.

Q: [60] One major complaint from our team is the difficulty of getting CI and unit tests executing with MSBuild of TFS. How have you ased that pain point?

A: In Orcas, CI should be pretty straightforward, since it is supported natively. For unit tests, we have added the ability to run tests by container (e.g. all tests within a particular DLL) instead of just by metadata file.

Q: [69] Are there any plans to make it possible to execute unit tests as part of the build without having a full copy of Visual Studio for Devs/Testers sat on the test machine?

A: In Orcas there will be no change in this regard. The build machine will require a full copy of VS test suite to execute unit tests as part of the build.

Q: [67] Will work items be hierarchical such that a backlog item can actually contain tasks rather than the tasks referencing the backlog item?

A: This won’t be in the Orcas release, but it is being considered for the following release.

Q: [32] Will Continous Integration builds in Orcas be as straight forward to create as CI builds using CruiseControl.NET?

A: In Orcas, CI is very well integreated scenario with the product and will be supported ‘out-of-box’. You will have support for ‘Schedule Build’ also out-of-box.

Q: [37] What is best practice for setting up user privileges in TFS (and by extension SharePoint and SQL)? Can you recommend a good set of instructions for this?

A: Our best practice here is to create AD security groups and then enter that group in each of the 3 apps (TFs, SRS, WSS) and then you only have to update that one AD group.

Q: [81] Are there any enhancements to data driven unit tests in Orcas? such as the ability to use XML data to drive the tests as opposed to a database?

A: Not in Orcas. We have this in mind for a Powertool release (and forward), but we don’t have a date on that yet.

Q: [15] On TFS, is it possible/easy to create your own build number format when running builds?

A: In general, you will want to do this by authoring a custom task and plugging it into the BuildNumberOverrideTarget. There should be an example of this on my blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/aaronhallberg.

Q: [51] Is there are way to associate a single unit test with more than one test list?

A: After you have your test lists created, you see them in the left pane of the Test Manager window. You can drag a test (any kind — unit, Web, etc.) from right pane into a test list. Then, click that list in the left pane to display its contents — you see the test that you dragged into it. Now, press CTRL and drag that test into any other test list that you have. The test is now in both lists.

Q: [86] How to migration TFS to TFS Orcas?

A: Our setup will take care of it. Note: migration to/from Orcas Beta 1 is not supported yet. Wait for Beta 2 to “go live”.

Q: [54] Is there a good refernce or a set of best practices for VS Team Test?

A: Hello, if you have specific questions we can help you here in the chat or at our forums, http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn; there are also books avaiable, some of them have been written by Microsoft employees who worked and/or work on the product. Take a look here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/aa718829.aspx

Q: [76] Please add my vote to making PowerShell support available in a PowerTools drop earlier. If I had to wait until post-Rosario that would really bite. 🙂

A: We will see what we can do. Currently this is not planned but I will try to add this as a request for our next powertool release. Thanks for the input.

Q: [102] Within Windows Vista, Is Orcas going to allow developers to work productively without requiring Administrative priviledges locally?

A: Jason Prickett says: “I’ve been running TFS on Vista for over a year, and it does not require adminstrator privileges.”

Q: [87] Team Test seems geared towared developers, not testers. I could be missing something, but I don’t know QA folks that think it’s useful enough to use. Are there any books/references/best practices that I can read to understand how to integrate the testers?

A: I am guessing when you say Testers you are referring to someone who does testing other than Unit Testing. The current feature set does support Testers who write automation that is at functional level thru test lists, results publishing, reporting etc. but there is not much to help the manual tester. That is going to be a big focus for Rosario.

Q: [9] 1. Where can we find instructions to automatically assign a bug to a user based on the Area it’s put in?

A: I don’t think this can currently be done using the existing UI. You’ll need to write some code.

Q: [107] i guess I was’t clear. Why do I have to use the non supported TFS admin tool to manage users..this should be a part of the Visual studio TFS client IMHO..does this change in the next release?

A: We have not made any headway on the permission synchronization issue. Currently you will have to use the opensource tool. This is highest priority for us going forward but will not be available in Orcas.

Q: [114] what recommendation do you have for implementing CI on 2005 in a way that primes us for an easy migration to Orcas?

A: Can’t really give you much advice here – there are CI solutions for 2005, but we don’t have upgrade paths from any of them to Orcas. You could download the Beta to try out the Orcas CI features – we would appreciate any feedback you might have here.

Q: [91] Where should we be keeping our test cases in TFS? We currently have a red x on the Documents folder (which goes back to the privileges question I asked earlier)…should they be in there? Is there a best practice for how to store these in TFS?

A: We store ours in version control. That makes the most sense for us because we rely on branching heavily (b) many or most of our testcases are automated. You can use the sharepoint Documents library if that makes more sense for you. For help on fixing the red X, please post on the forums or contact support.

Q: [135] we use team system to facilitate scrum on a big plasma screen. have you given any thought to a UI model for work items that simulates a scrum board? We are considering making one….

A: Can you give an example what it might look like? Does TeamPlain come close?

Q: [161] Re: Team plain for scrum, No. We are talking about something more like a desktop with widgets like 3X5 cards that you can move around. This would represent work items.

A: Interesting. No, I don’t think we have any UIs like that planned. This is a great example of something we’d like to see the community produce using our extensibility model.

Q: [99] What kind of changes are expected for the comming releases related to test case management? In particular: enhanced support for manual test case lifecycle and GUI automation.

A: Those are great suggestions. We’re actually looking into those for a future release of Team Test.

Q: [147] I see a lot about workflow, will we see a more mature workflow capability for workitems. Data driven forms controls without writing code, for example?

A: Not in orcas, no.

Q: [173] How do I move the Team Build scripts from a root folder into a sub folder within source control and still have Team Explorer pick them up.

A: In Orcas, you can put your Team Build scripts wherever you want – the Build Definition (formerly known as a build “type” has a property you can set to point to the server directory that contains the scripts. In VS 2005, this is not possible…

Q: [176] By creating A Team project, i have to configure the accounts for this project on 3 levels (Groups on TFS, Sharepoint and on the Reports site). Is there a way to do that once for all this three steps? WITHIUT USING TFSADMIN TOOL?

A: No. The only way to do this today is using the TFSAdmin tool from Codeplex.

Q: [175] can we expect any more work item controls to be released or any patches for the existing issues in work item controls

A: We will look to include things like work items control in future power tool releases. For more about this and the roadmap in general see this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/04/05/update-on-team-foundation-server-roadmap.aspx

Q: [154] Can i use Excel instead of Word for my manual tests? if so how.

A: Hello. We currently do not support this scenario. Manual tests are either Word based or text based… but we don’t have Excel manual tests. I do have to say though, that you should expect surprises in our future versions… our manual tests are going to be cool

Q: [191] how can we safely delete work items from backend any document on that

A: Here is one http://blogs.msdn.com/narend/archive/2006/10/17/deleting-workitems.aspx

Q: [143] what about the review workflow of tfs on the next release?

A: We are looking at a wide range of options for workflow improvements in future releases ranging from more flexilble work item rules and state models to things like integration with windows workflow foundation.

Q: [156] We are having a number of issues b/c our TFS server is managed by IT and us as developers are trying to determine peicemeal what we need them to give us access to. Is there a link or quick set of instructions (for SP, TFS, and SQL) that we could give them

A: Administrators: start here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms253096(VS.80).aspx
Project Admins, start here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms253174(VS.80).aspx
Contributors, start here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms252467(VS.80).aspx
For Orcas we are consolidating all this information.