I work at a startup which until now was just me as the sole developer.
Now we are starting to build a team it's time to get project planning, sprint & task planning, proper source control etc. sorted out.
We have MSDN and free Visual Studio Team Services so I thought I'd try that.
However it is really really unintuitive and I am struggling to find on google how to use it.
I am looking at features and sprint stuff and wondering how I am supposed to use it.
I also linked it to my Visual Studio but I created a work item in visual studio and can't find a way to sync it back so it appears on the Visual Studio Team Services page.
Any ideas? Am I doing it all wrong?
If anyone can explain how the Features and Backlog thing works that would be so helpful.
Our system is divided into several areas, one of them is for the customer portal. So a typical bit of work would be, on the customer portal, in the Administration section, we need a way to view all registered users.
So do I create a feature for Customer Portal with a sub feature for Administration and put it in there? Or do I create a Work Item for Customer Portal Administration View Users or something?
It needs to be manageable so my boss can look at what's going on, who is doing what etc. and nicely divided up. But honestly I am at a total loss of how to configure it. All I can find guide-wise is a bunch of marketing gumf on youtube and no real-life use case tutorials.
Please help! :(
We have some great walkthroughs at https://www.visualstudio.com/docs/overview that should get you started. In there you will find details on connecting with VS, using backlogs, taskboards, etc.
For case studies, here are a couple of links.
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-Visual-Studio-Online/Humanitarian-Toolbox/Visual-Studio-Online-Used-to-Energize-and-Optimize-Crowdsourced-Development/710000004013
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-Visual-Studio-Online/Eovendo/Cloud-Based-Load-Testing-Produces-Cost-Effective-Scaling-for-Ad-Rating-Service/710000003474
Related
I have started using Git for my other development projects (PHP, HTML, JavaScript, etc.) and can now see how beneficial it is, however I've been unable to find anything similar for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013 as a lot of the solution development is done within the web interface.
I'm guessing this is not possible, but could someone with more experience than me please confirm this or let me know which tools I should be looking into?
Thanks
You can use the Visual Studio Developer Toolkit available in the SDK to version control your plugins and web resources initially. I'd recommend this as your first step.
If you choose to take it further you can also look at using the SolutionPackager tool to version control your solutions. This will split out your solution zip file into separate version controllable files for each component. It works best when you follow the developer workflow outlined in the linked MSDN article
A recent hard-drive crash wiped my development environment at work, and until then, I never realised how much I had grown to depend on a couple of the functions in the Cool Commands plugin.
Despite my many and varied protestations, we are still languishing on VS2005, and it appears that all links to the Cool Commands plugin (for Visual Studio 2005) have disappeared from the internet.
Does anyone know if it is still available (from a reputable and virus free source of course)?
Found it here, linked from the developer's weblog here
It went away for a while, but it appears to be back
Microsoft has always been adamant about their use of "dogfooding" in the software development process, and it's made tools like Excel and Visual Studio work pretty well. My question is this: Do Microsoft employees use VSS? Have they ever used it? If not, what do they actually use? It seems to be such a flawed, inadequate version control system that I can't imagine that a competent developer would put up with it!
See the following links for details:
http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/windev/sourcesafe.html
http://www.developsense.com/testing/VSSDefects.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/08/source-control-anything-but-sourcesafe.html
I believe that nowadays most of the groups either do currently use or are migrating to Team Foundation Server.
It's not clear to me that Microsoft has ever come out and described in detail the tools they use, but I have heard in some deep, dark corners of the internet that the large teams (Windows team, Office team, etc) have, for a long, long time, used what is essentially a custom version of Perforce for version control. I have been led to believe that some teams have (attempted to) made use of SourceSafe, but it's never been widespread there.
They use Teamserver for source control (or so I was told whilst attending a visual studio event at the Reading campus)
is there a way to create a task/activity report (say a weekly report) off tasks managed with Mylyn? I've been using Rachota TimeTracker which allows me to create reports (in html format)
http://rachota.sourceforge.net/en/demo.html
I've just started using mylyn (our company uses Embarcadero JBuilder which is is based on Eclipse), but I don't see anywhere in the Eclipse or Embarcadero docs about reporting capabilities.
Is it possible? Is it possible to query activities worked on a prior week and report statistics out of it (management like reports, you know;) I'm sure it is, but I haven't been able to google it out.
Thanks.
You're in luck, Tasktop Pro (the supported version of Mylyn) has reporting. It allows you to:
View all task activity times for the previous day, week, and month
Manually adjust times as necessary to account for meetings and discussions
Submit your adjusted times, on tasks you select, to your task repository
Create reports in various formats
I'd recommend this short video which explains the reporting features in about 6 minutes.
David Shepherd
Tasktop Technologies
As you already know by now, the reporting functionality is included into commercial Tasktop product, which is developed by the same people who created Mylyn. So, obviously they are not interested to include some features into a free version. Now you have two options, either buy Tasktop, or develop your own extension for Mylyn. The task data is stored in reasonable simple xml file, so you not necessarily have to create an Eclipse plugin.
the reporting feature was stripped from the project when it used to be called mylar, in 2007, and since the project went commercial never came back to the open source mylyn for obvious reasons..
I found this simple perl script which outputs a pretty basic text only report, good enough for me.
http://rachaelandtom.info/mylyn-report
No takers? Not surprised since I can't find anything on the subject. For what's worth, there is an experimental task/activity report available for Mylyn with the sandbox jar. However, I could not get mine to work as I'm tied up with a JBuilder installation behind a firewall (and I can't download anything on the corp network that is not pre-evaluated... it sucks, I know.)
I'm going to have to experiment with the mylyn sandox at home, but it would be great if someone knows of an easier, more stable alternative.
I am a long time intellij user.
The company where I work is likely to introduce Rational Team Concert to our department shortly. I went to the RTC demo and it looks like a reasonable product, built around Eclipse, but I would rather not give up using IntelliJ.
Does anyone have experience of using non-eclipse IDEs with RTC?
This is going to be hard - you could configure IntelliJ to call the RTC scm commands, but this is not going to be that easy. I have heard of a company planning to build an integration, but not seen this myself (they might have finished this already). Company is called CM-Logic and is UK-based.
I use both of them together. You can't use IDEA to checking or deliver code, but you can certainly edit code in IDEA and then use the RTC tools to checkin.
One warning: I'm on Ubuntu 64-bit, and everything is fine. I have a co-worker using IDEA & RTC on Windows 7 and he has to close IDEA every time he wants to check-in because IDEA has file locks that RTC balks at.
I have no knowledge of the CM Logic's JazzConnect-IDEA product. There doesn't seem to be any way to download a demo of it either.
Rational Team Concert's integration page says "Jazz Connect for IntelliJ IDEA enables developers using JetBrains to leverage the power of Rational Team Concert for source control, work item management, and collaboration services."
Also have a look at this page for other integrations of RTC.
I would say that it could, it looks like IntelliJ offers an version control integration point as does the Jazz SCM component, but I am not familiar enough with IntelliJ to say for sure(looks like ClearCase is already on the list so they are adding support for vendors), I would think that without a full fledged integration where your Work Items are integrated into your development RTC starts to loose it's flair but may be not for your management :)
It seems that the answer is no.
Coexistence could cover many aspects; source code repository, Task lists, builds etc. But the first step would be integrating with source code repository and RTC uses something called Jazz.
There seems to be no available plugin nor plans for such.
Update on this: A new feature for Intellij is in the works, and planned or release this year. Here is the internal RFE. The links tab has a video recording of RTC integration with IDEA.
https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWorkItem&id=358932&tab=com.ibm.team.workitem.tab.links (Jazz ID authentication required)