Professional Team Foundation Server

Chapter 16. Monitoring Your Team Project Metrics Using SQL Server Reporting Services

Metrics are undoubtedly one of the most important features of Team System. Team System's reporting infrastructure provides visibility and transparency within your Team Project. It is the key area to help you effectively manage software development projects using software engineering techniques. For example, you can track the velocity of your team and react to potential bottlenecks (instances of special cause variation) using the Remaining Work report.

The Team System reporting infrastructure has value to all the members of your team: the project manager can use summary reports to understand the big picture; developers and testers can look at meaningful data (such as code coverage) to get a view of their particular slice of the project.

You can look at a project metrics two main ways. The traditional (also referred to as waterfall view), shows a view of common project management elements such as time, resources, functionality, and quality. In this project management approach, you track the progress of tasks against set requirements. Within a time scope, your developers will try to develop an application against a range of specifications. In his book Software Engineering using Visual Studio Team System, Sam Guckenheimer refers to this approach as "Work Down."

Team System provides you with the tools to approach software development using a completely opposite "Value Up" approach—a combination of ...