October 2008 - Posts
This is going to be an amazing release...
Check out the team collaboration features in the new power tools that are about to be released.
Read more in Brian Harry's blog post
Administrators the salvation is near the corner, in the new power tools there is a grate solution for the custom items publishing!!!
A few days ago I went to a customer of mine that wants to produce a higher quality products.
The main candidate for the modification was the QA group because the QA group is responsible for the quality in the development process.
After a short investigation it was shown that not only the QA team should be modified but all the "players" that take part in the development process of the products should be a part of the change.
Some of the conclusion were:
- better requirements should be written so that the QA will have its main input for the quality process.
- A change management process should be established so all changes made after the planning phase will be properly checked for there influence on the development process.
- Unit tests should be written by the developers.
- Bugs should have a proper work flow not only inside the QA team but thru all the bug's lifecycle.
These are not all the conclusions from our investigation, but it can show that changes should be made thru all the application lifecycle in order to get a better quality.
It is a common mistake to blame the QA for a poor quality of a product, I don't say that this is not the case the QA team has the biggest influence on the quality, what I say is that a more comprehensive investigation should be made in order to see what the problem really is before we put the blame...
This post is the sixth post out of seven that builds the Excel Guide. See the first post here
On this post I will talk about the Parent Child relations between work items and how it works with Excel.
In the Rosario there are new type of links, but the most influencing link type that was added to the Rosario is the Parent/Child link.
Parent/Child link links many child nodes to each parent node, a parent can have many children but each child have only one parent so what we get is an hierarchy of a tree type.
In the Rosario version the Excel has an implementation for that link type.
The way that a Parent/Child is implemented is in columns indentation of the title field, means that the parent will be in the first title field, his child will be on the second and so on up to the bottom of the tree.
Here is the result for a query of type tree that results with one parent user story and one child user story.
To add another level in the tree mark the second line’s title field and clicking the “Add Child” button. (Will be shown in the Rosario version only)
The result is a new work item and a new column of title to show there is one more level in the tree.
You can continue to play with the levels and number of child rows you add to a parent.
Remember that there can be only one parent to each child.
There are other link types in the Rosario, I leave that to the reader to investigate further, other link types will not be shown in the Excel.
In order to add different link types to a work item use the “Links and Attachments” button.
Note that in order to use this button the target work item must be published first.
See you on the last part of this guide on my next post...
This post is the fifth post out of seven that builds the Excel Guide. See the first post here
On this post I will talk about the Get Work Items function and how to Change List Configurations that are available in the Excel.
Excel is showing the user only the work items he has chosen to see, what if he likes to add more to that list? This is exactly that reason Excel has the “Get Work Items” functionality.
To get Work Items do the following steps:
Step 1: Click on “Get Work Items” button
Step 2: In the window that pops up choose the work items to add and click OK.
The “Configure List” sets the Refresh method mode.
There are two modes:
- Refresh From Query – When this option is chosen each Refresh will set the list to contain all the work items that answers the query’s conditions.
- Refresh Current Work Items Only – When this option is chosen each refresh will update all the changes in the current list of work items from the server, no new work items will be added.
When exporting from a query the first mode will be the default, when exporting from a chosen work items the second mode will be the default.