TFS User Guide

PreviousArticleI have briefly introduced the installation and management of TFS. This article mainly describes some guide and suggestions for using TFs during my work. Preview the content of this chapter:

 

1. Project Plan and tracking

Many friends often complain about the fearlessness of planning in their daily chats, because the planning will never catch up with changes. Indeed, the plan cannot keep up with the changes, but you don't plan, you never know what you should do, and when to do it, although it has changed, however, you can customize the solution and positioning of changes based on the original plan to control the evolution of changes.

1.1. Use a project to develop a project plan

Create a new project file and open the project-document-project management-development project planning .xlsx file in the dialog box of the TFS team resource manager. In this case, all files opened are empty project files, which can be planned.

Select the project team tab and click Select a team project,

In the displayed dialog box, select the project to be released. After confirmation, the project will add the TFS-related title fields and function options by default.

Now, you need to specify your project plan in the project, and perform the same operations as usual. It is roughly as follows:

Step 1: Develop an iteration plan and a general work plan for this iteration.

Step 2: list all the work content of this iteration, arrange priorities and dependencies.

Step 3: estimate the content, start time, end time, resources, and estimated duration of each job.

After the plan is completed, it needs to be synchronized to TFs so that other team members or team leaders can obtain the task and perform more detailed decomposition. The synchronization operation is very simple. You only need to click the release button under the team tab.

Note: If the entered Project Plan encounters an exception or does not meet the requirements during synchronization, the incorrect items and suggested modification instructions will pop up automatically.

After the release is completed, the team lead can be notified to make a more detailed division of the plan.

To allow Members to quickly locate their tasks, a team query is required. This operation is generally conducted by the TFS configuration administrator. The operation is as follows: Go to the team manager, select project-team query, right-click Add, and operate

After the dialog box is displayed, configure the following conditions:

After setting, click Save and enter any name ("My work items" is recommended ").

Next, the team leaders log on to the team resource manager, click work item-team query, and select the query you just created. vs lists all work items that belong to you.

If you accept the plan in Vs, you can directly use the various operations provided by Vs to plan the plan, but if you want to export the plan to the project and then import it, the operation is simple.

After the query results are displayed, click:

Here we can see that it can be exported to an Excel or project. We will select a commonly used project. After selection, the project file will be automatically created and the data will be refreshed to the file.

Note: The project edited here is completely different from the concept of modifying a project file with multiple users.

As a result, you can specify a plan for the remaining work in the project, and then publish it to TFs using the release function.

After the task refinement is completed, the team members will work according to the assigned tasks.

1.2. Information Association

Now that we start working, we will activate the task status (this process can be customized, which is just described as a situation) and then start to implement the task requirements, after the task is completed, return to TFs and change the task status to "resolved", and then go to the next task.

However, the preceding method is not very good. The task record provided by TFs not only records the completion status of the task, but also can be associated with a lot of information, check the dialog box for creating a new task:

Detailed information can be used to record how the task is executed and problems encountered;

All links canSource codeTo know which taskCodeModified;

Attachments can upload other content related to this task, such as files.

I personally suggest you develop good habits and associate as much information as possible with task items, which is good for you, project members, and project managers, the Project Manager can reduce the communication cost, learn the difficulty and completion of the task through the task item, and the project team members can also learn about the project through the task item.

1.3. project tracking

With the above operations and data accumulation, the overall tracking of the Project is no longer a difficult task. You can easily open the TFS query and select unfinished projects, you can locate the current project in either the completed project or other dimensions.

Of course, TFs also provides many reports for analysis from different perspectives, and provides them to the project manager to analyze the project status. These reports and queries can be customized by themselves.

2.
Source code management

Many people only use the source code management function of TFs to use TFs. Here I will briefly introduce some useful functions of source code management and how to use them.

2.1. checkin Policy

The so-called checkin policy is to check whether your request meets the requirements every time you perform a checkin operation according to the defined policy, the most common rules are the policies that must be associated with work items, and the checkin must be annotated.

You can customize or use the default policies based on the features of the Team Project.

Right-click a project and choose source code management,

In the pop-up window, select an immigration policy. If you select add, you can see the current default policy:

The import and use of custom policies are not discussed in this article due to the long length. For details, refer to Microsoft msdn.

2.2. Multi-Point checkout and merge Modification

The source code manager of TFS runs multiple people to checkout a file. After the checkin is modified, the file will be automatically merged for you. When there is a conflict, an editor will be provided to you to choose how to modify the file. In my opinion, it is easy to use. The description is not available because there is no checkin conflict code.

Here is a brief description: When two people respectively check out the same file, if the two modify the different locations of the same file, the Code Manager will automatically merge the files for you; if you modify the version in the same region at the same time, the conflicting editor will show you which version you want to use.

2.3. Tag

Labeling is to identify the current source code status so that the source code of this version can be called up in the future. General application scenarios: release a version.

Operation: Right-click the directory of the source code manager and select the application tag from the shortcut menu,

3.
Document management

The document directory under the project in the team resource manager provides document-related management functions. Generally, documents in our project can be uploaded here as a way to share and manage document versions.

When I used windows2008r2, I found that I could not open the Word document directly and click Edit to check out the file. Each time I downloaded the entire file, the entire file was uploaded again after modification, google's search for related content seems to be a bug.

4.
Generate

To use the generated service, you must configure it on the server.

Open the TFS console and select "generate configuration". here you need to create a new controller and proxy. When I create a controller, the default attributes are basically used.

The generation of TFS has never been used very well and has never been successful many times. It may be mainly related to the project structure or configuration. New Generation Method

In this part, I always hope to modify the Generation Process Template so that after TFs is generated, the VM can be started to restore a certain State snapshot, and then automatically deploy the snapshot. Then, I can run the automatic test and finally submit the report. (Under study)

Under normal circumstances, the generated content of the definition includes the trigger and workspace, and other reserved content is basically normal by default. TFs will compile and generate and perform unit tests according to the workspace you specified.

5.
Use Process Template 5.1. Workflow

5.2. Use agile templates

Use the work items provided by the default agile Template

The process is as follows: first define the iteration plan, define the description of the current iteration user scenario, then divide the subtasks that implement the user scenario, and design test cases, after each task is completed, test the feedback bug. In agile standing meetings, questions raised can be recorded by work items.

5.3. template customization suggestions

The default work item template provided by TFs can be modified as follows:

The Start Time and end time are moved from the default tab to the first item, so that we can see the first visual display when entering or viewing the task during planning. For the start time and end time, because the default configuration is not to refresh data from TFs to the project, I think to maintain the consistency between TFs and the project, it is recommended to remove publishonly = true when ing. Similarly, the end time also has this problem.

We are used to planning with a planned time and actual time. I think the starting and ending time of TFS is regarded as the planned time, the activation time and resolution time are the actual start time and end time of the task, which is relatively secure. However, to do this, you must standardize your operation habits and activate the task each time you start the task, instead of completing the TFS operation after the task is completed.

Finally, we should not take tools as the burden of work. We should choose good tools to improve work efficiency and work methods. Instead of tools, attitudes and methods at work are the most important.