Adding multiple users at a time in Visual Studio Team Services

While I was preparing VSTS instances for a training I was giving I had to add a list of 20 users in a Team Services instance. At the time I couldn’t find a way to do that from the web interface so I looked at the web api. Gave me the same results. After questions asks to MVPs I know, no better idea than adding them one by one manually. So I started to add them one by one. Then after some times moaning against Microsoft I asked myself and if they thought of it and considered “;” separators when adding multiple users? I than tried and it worked ! It also worked when you want to add a list of users as Project Administrators or any security level you want.

Here is an example of adding 3 users in one click. Just separate them with a semicolon !

Connect Power BI to your on Premise TFS

Power BI is a powerful tool which allows you to easily build interactive data visualizations from almost any type of data you have. This Microsoft tool can be used as a desktop app, mobile app or directly online. It is free of use if you don’t have a lot of data and quite cheap if you need more. I am not a business intelligence developer and I don’t have a BI background at all still I found Power BI a great way to quickly build my dashboards.

As an agile developer and scrum master I wanted to capitalize on the data we have from TFS and make even more complete dashboard than the ones built in. I tried online with my msdn linked Team Services account and It was so mind blowing that I immediately wanted to use it at work. BUT – there is a but – Power BI does not have a TFS connector for on premises TFS servers. And it’s clearly not in the top of their backlog.

So here is the trick to connect Power BI to your on Premise TFS platform.

1. Download and install Power BI Desktop
2. Launch Power BI and in the first screen click on Get Data
3. On the Get Data window choose Database then SQL Analysis Services Database. Then click on Connect.
   If you don’t have rights to query this DB ask for a read access.
   
4. Now enter the Server instance name and click on OK.
   
5. In the Navigator window you can now choose which dimension you want to work on.
   For building dashboards regarding teams I use the Work Item perspective.
6. Now you’re all set to build nice data visualization reports.
   

Another post will follow on how quickly build some reports with Power BI.

Release Burnup Chart in TFS 2015

With TFS 2015 you can create and add charts to your team dashboard quite easily. In a previous post I was explaining how to create a simple task burndown chart. So in order to have various indicators displayed on your dashboard we will now see how to create the associated query and add the chart

1. Go to to your TFS Team Project with your favorite browser
2. Click on the Work tab, then select the Queries sub tab.
3. On the left of the Shared Queries click on the mouse over arrow and select New Query.
   
4. Create and save the query as shown below :
5. 
   Just 3 lines with:
   • Area Path : Select the area path of the team you want to monitor
   • Work Item Type : Product Backlog Item as they hold the effort
   • State : New, Committed and Done. You can replace New by Approved if you use it to effectively tag the PBIs approved by the PO to be in the backlog.
6. Go back to your TFS Team Project home page (top left). And click on the green plus icon at the bottow right of the screen. (mouse over the blue pencil to see it).

   

   Go to to your TFS Team Project with your favorite browser
7. Click on the Work tab, then select the Queries sub tab.
8. On the left of the Shared Queries click on the mouse over arrow and select New Query.
   
9. Create and save the query as shown below :
10. 
    Just 3 lines with:
    • Area Path : Select the area path of the team you want to monitor
    • Work Item Type : Product Backlog Item as they hold the effort
    • State : New, Committed and Done. You can replace New by Approved if you use it to effectively tag the PBIs approved by the PO to be in the backlog.
11. Go back to your TFS Team Project home page (top left). And click on the green plus icon at the bottow right of the screen. (mouse over the blue pencil to see it).

    

1. Select the Chart for Work Items widget and click on Add.

   

   
2. Fill the configuration with the following
   

   

   
   Select the previously created query and the Stacked area chart type.
3. Scroll and fill the remaining as below then click on Save
   

   

   
   Stack by : State
   Values : Sum of Effort
   Range : Last 12 weeks
   Sort by Descending Value

Congratulations you now have a release burnup on your dashboard.

From this basic query you can also create those charts :
Work By Team > Segregate by Area Path
Cumulative Flow > Count Product Backlog Items instead of have a Sum of Effort.

A Simple Task Burndown with TFS 2015

I work with and for a Scrum team that is only estimating effort associated to their Product Backlog Items (PBIs). This team is still quite young so I orientated them to break down the work into tasks so they can share a common view of what to do for each PBI. They were fine estimating an effort for their PBIs but not for the tasks as they didn’t want to talk about hours. After few sprints and after some time their velocity looks quite stable but the last week of each sprint was usually a mess. The only bad indicator during their sprints was they weren’t able to see when they were going to land the sprint and get the work done. Their impossibility to see the rate at which they were accomplishing the work was really missing and the only way to see that was to look at the task board and visually estimate their progress depending on the number of task on each of the three columns (To Do / In Progress / Done).

The team was using TFS 2015 and as you may know the task burndown is only working with tasks estimated in hours. Not a solution here. So here are few steps to create your own task burndown with TFS 2015.

1. Go to to your TFS Team Project with your favorite browser
2. Click on the Work tab, then select the Queries sub tab.
3. On the left of the Shared Queries click on the mouse over arrow and select New Query.
   
4. Create and save the query as shown below
   
5. Now put your mouse over the created Shared query on the left and click on the arrow then select Add to Team Favorites.
   
6. Go back to your TFS Team Project home page. And click on the green plus icon at the bottow right of the screen. (mouse over the blue pencil to see it).
7. Select the Chart for Work Items widget and click on Add.
   
8. Fill the configuration with the following
   
9. If you have existing work items you should be able to select the color of your choosing for each work item state (To Do / Done / In Progress …)
   

This is an example of the task burndown. As you can see the iteration started on the 19th of may and they created tasks progressively. Then we can see an increase in the In Progress and Done state day after day. The flat line is due to the week end.

Please note that doing a task burndown like this will work a lot better if the tasks have all approximately the same size. If not this can result in the team having a false positive key performance indicator. For example, a team having done 80% of the tasks few days before the end of the sprint but the 20% remaining tasks avec representing 80% of the work ! So be careful when using this, the team must be aware and well informed about the risks.