Maybe my next post will just be about why I am so excited and impressed with
the out of
the box templates. But, for this first blog with my new focus, I thought I would just walk through
the process I went through to create a task progress report (to enhance
the out of
the box Agile template). So, I started with
the MSF for Agile Development 5.0 RC template. After reviewing
the template, I came away pretty excited about many of
the new reports. I am especially excited about
the reporting services reports.
The big advantage I see here is that these are querying
the Warehouse directly instead of
the Analysis Services Cube which means that they are much closer to real-time which I find very important for reports like Burndown and task status. One report that I focused on right away was
the User Story Progress Report. An overview is shown below: This report is very useful, but a lot of our internal managers really prefer to manage at
the task level and either
dont have stories in TFS or would like to view this type of report for tasks in addition to
the User Stories. So, what did I do? Step 1: Download
the Agile Template In VS 2010 RC, open Process Template Manager from Team->Team Project Collection Settings. Download
the MSF for Agile Development template to your local file system. A project template is a folder of xml files. There is a ProcessTemplate.xml in
the root and then a bunch of directories for things like Work Item Definitions and Queries, Reports, Shared Documents and Source Control Settings. Step 2: Copy
the folder My plan here is to make a new template with all of my modifications. You can also just enhance update
the MSF template. However, I think it is cleaner when you start making modifications to make your own template. So, copy
the folder and name it with your new template name. Step 3: Change Template Name Open ProcessTemplate.xml and change
the <name> of
the template. Step 4: Copy
the rdl of
the Report you want to use a starting point In my case, I copied Stories Progress.rdl and named
the file Task Progress Breakdown.rdl. I reviewed
the requirements for
the new report with some of
the users here and came up with this plan. Should show tasks and be expandable to show subtasks. Should add Assigned To and Estimated Finish Date as 2 extra columns. Step 5: Walkthrough
the existing report to understand how it works
The main thing that I do here is try to get
the sql to run in SQL Management Studio. So, I can walkthrough
the process of building up
the data for
the report. After analyzing this particular report I found a couple of very useful things. One, this report is already built to display subtasks if I just flip
the IncludeTasks flag to 1. So, if you are using Stories and have tasks assigned to each story. This might give you everything you want. For my purposes, I did make that change to
the Stories Progress report as I find it to be a more useful report to be able to see
the tasks that comprise each story. But, I still wanted a task only version with
the additional fields. Step 6: Update
the report definition I tend to work on rdl in visual studio directly as xml. Especially when I am just altering an existing report, I find it easier than trying to deal with
the BI Studio designer. For my report I made
the following changes. Updated Fields Removed Stack Rank and Replaced with Priority since we
dont use Stack Rank Added FinishDate and AssignedTo Changed
the root deliverable SQL to pull @tasks instead of @deliverablecategory and added a join CurrentWorkItemView for FinishDate and Assigned to SELECT cwi.[System_Id] AS ID FROM [CurrentWorkItemView] cwi WHERE cwi.[System_WorkItemType] IN (@Task) AND cwi.[ProjectNodeGUID] = @ProjectGuid SELECT lh.SourceWorkItemID AS ID FROM FactWorkItemLinkHistory lh INNER JOIN [CurrentWorkItemView] cwi ON lh.TargetWorkItemID = cwi.[System_Id] WHERE lh.WorkItemLinkTypeSK = @ParentWorkItemLinkTypeSK AND lh.RemovedDate = CONVERT(DATETIME, '9999', 126) AND lh.TeamProjectCollectionSK = @TeamProjectCollectionSK AND cwi.[System_WorkItemType] NOT IN (@DeliverableCategory) Added AssignedTo and FinishDate columns to
the @Rollups table Added two columns to
the table used for column headers <Tablix Name="ProgressTable"> <TablixBody> <TablixColumns> <TablixColumn> <Width>2.7625in</Width> </TablixColumn> <TablixColumn> <Width>0.5125in</Width> </TablixColumn> <TablixColumn> <Width>3.4625in</Width> </TablixColumn> <TablixColumn> <Width>0.7625in</Width> </TablixColumn> <TablixColumn> <Width>1.25in</Width> </TablixColumn> <TablixColumn> <Width>1.25in</Width> </TablixColumn> </TablixColumns> Added Cells for
the two new headers Added Cells to
the data table to include
the two new values (Assigned to & Finish Date) Changed a bunch of widths that would change
the format of
the report to display landscape and have room for
the two additional columns Set
the Value of
the IncludeTasks Parameter to 1 <ReportParameter Name="IncludeTasks"> <DataType>Integer</DataType> <DefaultValue> <Values> <Value>=1</Value> </Values> </DefaultValue> <Prompt>IncludeTasks</Prompt> <Hidden>true</Hidden> </ReportParameter> Change a few descriptions on how
the report should be used This is
the resulting report I have attached
the final rdl. Step 7: Update ReportTasks.xml Last step before
the template is ready for use is to update
the reportTasks.xml file in
the reports folder. This file defines
the reports that are available in
the template. <report name="Task Progress Breakdown" filename="Reports\Task Progress Breakdown.rdl" folder="Project Management" cacheExpiration="30"> <parameters> <parameter name="ExplicitProject" value="" /> </parameters> <datasources> <reference name="/Tfs2010ReportDS" dsname="TfsReportDS" /> </datasources> </report> Step 8: Upload
the template Open
the process Template Manager just like Step 1. And upload
the new template. Thats it. One other note, if you want to add this report to existing team project you will have to go into reportmanager (the reporting services portal) and upload
the rdl to that projects directory.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.
