Loïc Baumann's Blog : WINetwork, EN

Work Item Creator 1.4 is available on Codeplex !

loicbaumann — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:10:00 GMT

A new version is available on codeplex.

As I said there, it should be a 2.0 version as there are so many new features.

Installation:

A lot easier and faster than before. You can now install and setup the whole stuff in few minutes.
An administration application let you setup the WICreator for your TFS Server, and for each Team Project you want.

User experience improved:

The last used Team Project is restored when launching the WICreator application.
There’s now a Most Recent Used (the yellow star icon) Work Item menu item.
The user can create several Work Items at once, based on predefined templates.
Area Path and Iteration can now be spread among children.
The hierarchy fields are automatically added to a Team Project’s Work Item Type definitions when they’re not present.

Integration using Work Item:

The integration process can be driven by Work Item (you have to follow the 1 changeset / 1 Work Item associated rule strictly). Integration features will be available to member of a given TFS Role.
The Branch Comparison feature display for selected branches (scoped in time) what Work Items are implemented or not.
The Make New Release feature enables you to merge your work based on Work Items. A Work Item query lists all the Work Items concerned by the integration (typically filtered by Iteration) and is filtered by the ones that are present in the source branch and not in the destination one. The user can choose the Work Items to merge, then their corresponding changesets. The Release process then merges all the changesets, and keep the association with the corresponding Work Item.

Misc:

The hierarchy of the Work Items on a given Team Project can now be checked for integrity (only users having the Integration role can use it) and fixed if there’re problems.
Many little bugs fixed.

Here's a Video of the installation and setup process, you'll see it's quite pain free now !

I'll post more about the new features, with hopefully some videos demonstrating them.

TFS 2008's GetMergeCandidates improvements and WICreator updates

loicbaumann — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:06:00 GMT

Hi all, still alive! :)
It's been a long time I didn't blog, too many things going on in life.

This is will be short. I wanted to say few things:

Good job the TFS Team for the TFS 2008 Release! Especially for the GetMergeCandidates API improvement! I blogged about that in the past: in TFS 2005 it was bugged, and slow. And now I can say: "yey, it's fast and it's working!"
Now it's bug free: I could remove the code I've made in WICreator for the "Merge by Work Items" feature.
Before it took around 10 minutes for one API call for two branches with lots of changesets, now it's taking only 20 seconds! The integration people loved the TFS 2008 upgrade, I can tell you!
As I said in a recent post on the WICreator Codeplex's project, I'm starting again working on WICreator, the "Merge by Work Items" feature is pretty stable and usable now (we use it in production for at least 4 months; we did around 30 releases with it). So I'm going to make a new Codeplex release, containing this major feature, and small other ones.
I'm thinking about an "administration" part for WICreator that will do for you most of the boring tasks post setup: WITs' fields creation for hierarchy, alert registration, few configuration of the NetworkModels.xml file. I think this feature would enhance the adoption of WICreator and WINetwork.
I'm going to work on a "killer feature", well, more a "flashy feature", I hope it won't take too much time or I won't be able to release it. I really hope I will find time to do it, because it's going to be great!
One hint: WICreator is going to be .Net 3.0!

That's it people, keep in touch for coming events.

Thanks to all the people who use WICreator, drop me a comment if you use it, I'm always curious! :)

It's time to merge some Work Items

loicbaumann — Fri, 25 May 2007 14:01:00 GMT

Using the Work Item Creator to create Work Items in a hierarchical way was the first step to reach one of the goals I set myself.
The Work Items are here to describe your project:
- On the management side with mainly the Change Request and Bug ones.
- On the development side with mainly the Task ones.

What about the interaction with the Source Control? Well, when we check-in code, we associate a Task Work Item with it. The Task is owned by a Change Request or a Bug, which symbolize a feature or a fix.

All the code we're checking-in is in a "Dev" branch, whatever the iteration we're targeting, when the development is done, it's checked in there.
Alongside with the Dev branch, we have one branch (created from the Dev on) per release of our software.

So what am I so interested to do? Simply to control the creation/update of a release through the use of the Work Items!
A release is done by selecting the features/fix you want it to contain through the selection of the corresponding Work Items. The Work Item Creator will analyze the changesets that belong to these features, and merge them to your target branch, ignoring the ones you don't want!

Here's a preview of the form:

Updated version of WICreator on Codeplex

loicbaumann — Fri, 25 May 2007 14:00:00 GMT

A quick post to say there's a release 1.3 of the Work Item Creator on Codeplex, the sources (including the setup) are updated and in sync with this release.

I've added few features:
1) Now you can customize the Actions menu to specify the types of Work Item you want to create.
2) The icons corresponding to the Work Item types are now stored on the WebService so that you can add icons for your own custom Work Item types (see the "About & Setup" document about that).

I also fixed few bugs.

Drop me a message on Codeplex if you're using it, I'm always interested to get some feedback!

WICreator & WINetwork released on Codeplex!

loicbaumann — Wed, 09 May 2007 13:59:00 GMT

I'm pleased to announce you that the Work Item Creator and WINetwork are both available in codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/wicreator.

It's a start, the setup process is not as easy I'd want to, but I can assure you it worth going through it!
I'm waiting your feedback by email or directly in the discussion forum in Codeplex.

If people are willing to help the application evolving, let me know!

Concerning the Work Item Creator application, I've added interesting features:

Siblings ordering in the hierarchy.
Tree View filtering by Title content and by the following fields of a Work Item: State, Created By, Assigned To, Work Item Type. The possible values are dynamically built, I'm kinda proud of it! :)
The saving process was optimized.

News about WICreator and WINetwork

loicbaumann — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:58:00 GMT

Many people asked if there would be a release of these tools, all I can say so far is "there's a good chance" and it may be open sourced.

To release them I have to enhance things because I really do want them to be highly configurable and adaptable to your Process Template. That means I have to be able to deal with any kind of Work Item Types (as long as my three custom fields are declared), custom States, etc.

We use them in production already, and if there's a release, I want any team to be able to use them in production too. Otherwise it would be pointless...

I also want both WICreator and WINetwork to be plugable. The first in-house plugin will be the creation of Work Items from JIRA Issues in WICreator and the workflow synchronization between a Work Item and its corresponding JIRA Issue in the WINetwork.

The wish list for WICreator also includes:

Ordered Hierarchy (almost done).
A filter for the TreeView (Work Item Types, States, Owner).
A "Favorites" list for the recent opened databases.
Visual Studio Package instead of a standalone application? (your thought about that is welcomed)
Integration with MS Project Server (in my dreams or at least in a not so near future): linking a Work Item with a MS Project Task, being able to update the task from a Work Item. No more Project Web Access for timesheet updates!

Stay tuned!

A change in handling Hierarchy

loicbaumann — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 13:55:00 GMT

My team came up with a request that looked at first « easy to code » but which turned out to be a real pain: managing order in siblings.

As I wrote in a previous post, I was using the Work Item's Links (to link a son with its father) and a custom field "ParentWI" to handle the Hierarchy.

The pros:

I'm relying on existing features of Team System, it's supposed to make the enhancement tighter with the original software.
I thought it would be easier to code it that way... Well, until I had to code it!

The cons:

It turned out that the Links of type "Work Item" are bidirectional, and then automatically created on the opposite way when you create a new link. This is a REAL PAIN for the implementation, because you constantly have to SyncToLatest() the opposite Work Item after creating a Link. And looks like it's not always working: there are some times when I have exceptions raising because of my Work Item not up to date with the server.

This issue is emphasized by the fact that you CAN'T merge Work Item: I you made changes locally and the Work Item was changed (due to the bidirectional link creation, for instance) by the time you save it, it throws you an exception...Not very handy or easy to encounter...
There is no order between siblings, not even a chronological one. I first thought that the order will be chronological, but it turned out it has no sense at all (on a functional point of view). And my teammates yell at me "why the order changed suddently!!!"

I came to the point that I had to implement hierarchy in a different way: forget about the Links, this is just a nightmare for WI Hierarchy and I can't really see the advantages for the price I pay to use them.

The solution was not complicated to find: add two more custom fields.
"FirstChildWI", it contains the ID of the first child of the Work Item.
"NextWI", it contains the ID of the next sibling.
I don't need a "PrevWI" kind of field, parsing backward is not very useful, and I can still do it without it.

Another solution would have been to create a "ChildrenWI" custom field of type String that references all the children in a given order. But I assumed (maybe I'm wrong) that the String type has a limited size, and I wouldn't want to limit the count of children.

So here I am, three custom fields for the hierarchy, no more Links to handle, a simplified saving process, and I still kept the ability to create new Work Items in a hierarchical way WITHOUT saving them right away (which lets the user the possibility to "delete" the Work Item if needed).

The user has the ability to reorder its Work Items, life is good! :)

WI Creator and WINetwork in action !

loicbaumann — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 13:54:00 GMT

I've made some videos of the WICreator application, used with the WINetwork system.
Check them out, I think they worth it!

This one is about the creation of a project and the realization of a task with a code review. Both processes use the WINetwork to ease the communication and synchronization of Work Items.
Use of the Recycle Bin.
An example (in French) of a real project.

I should have disabled the ClearType font antialiasing for the Video Capture, looks ugly because of it...

One last thing, and not the least, if you want to know how the whole thing works internally, check out this XML file. It defines what type of Work Items we can create in respect of the hierarchy, and also describes all the Work Item Network Models I told about in this post.

Work Item Network Models

loicbaumann — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:45:00 GMT

Now we have hierarchy in our Work Item, we can take things to another level. The Hierarchy implies a relation between these Work Items, so it is natural to think that when one's is evolving, it impacts its surroundings.

For instance, you have a Change Request that has three child Tasks:

The Request becomes Active when at least one of the tasks turns to Active.
The Request will becomes Resolved when all the Tasks will be Closed.
The Request will be Closed when everything will be integrated, tested and validated by the testing team.

What is important here is that the Change Request is assigned to the Team Leader of the evolution to realize, each Task are assigned to developers. When a developer starts working on a Task, he switches its state from Proposed to Active. This field change will trigger an alert that will result in the activation of the owner Change Request, and the Team Leader will get an email to inform him that the Change Request is finally starting (because one of his Work Items was changed by someone else)!

This is just a simple example of what we can do, but we can imagine things more complicated, that would be real time saver for team management and communication.

The "Models" we've implemented so far are:

Project Management

The project management model ensures the synchronization between the states of the Change Request and Bug Work Items. A Change Request can contains zero or many Change Requests or Bugs. A whole project can be organized is a hierarchical way, and you know easily what is still planned, in progress, realized, closed, and that at a macro or micro level!

Synchronization rules are simple:

A parent is Proposed if all its children are Proposed.
A parent is Active if at least one of the children is Active.
A parent is Resolved if all its children are Resolved.
A parent is Closed when all its children are Closed.

Change Request

This model is made of a Change Request that contains one or many Tasks. The rules are:

The Change Request becomes active when at least one of its children Task becomes Active.
It turns to Resolved when all the Tasks are Closed.
It turns back to Active at least one Task was reactivated because of a test that failed.
It turns to Closed if all validation and tests was successfully accomplished.

Bug

This model has two cases:

a) A simple bug, it will contain one child Task that will be assigned to the developer.
b) A complex bug, it will contain a Change Request using the "Change Request" model to develop the fix.

The first case follows the same logic than the "Change Request" model, but with only one child Task. The second case is an instance of the "Change Request" model.

Task development

Code reviews are a must for us, and for a given category of developers we want to validate the code before it is checked-in. This model takes care of that. The Task Work Item has a child Review Work Item in a Proposed state. When the developer has finished its code, he switches the state of the Task from Active to Review Pending. This state transition will activate the Review, and the code reviewer will be aware it's time to make it! If the review failed, the Work Item will turn back to Proposed, putting automatically the Task in Active state. If the review succeeds, the code reviewer will pass the Review Closed, which will automatically set the Task's state to Pending Check-in (a developer can't set this state). The developer then will be able (thanks to a check-in policy) to check his code in, and the Task will turn to Closed.

These descriptions of models are a simplification of what we're really doing right now.
Things were tricky to design at first, but once the main models with the main cases were done, the implementation went smoothly, and the day-to-day utilization is now really intuitive.

Hierarchy in Work Items

loicbaumann — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:10:00 GMT

Relationship between Work Items is something important to me.
The first thing that is obviously missing is a sense of hierarchy. Hierarchy is everywhere in life, so it is in a project management. Of course you can live without this notion in Team System thanks to Areas and Iterations, but it’d cost you more time to manage things if you can’t relate your Work Items with a parent/son relationship.

Here is a concrete case of what I wanted to be possible:

Project management becomes easier, and programmers' life too.

Yellow stars are Change Requests, Green checks are Tasks, Red crosses are Bugs, and the Warning-like icon is an Issue.
Change request are owned by Project Leaders, Tasks are assigned to developers, Bugs are created by the Testing Team, and Issues are declared by users when they can't complete a given task due to an external reason.

A picture like that talks a lot more than a Query result on a given Area, don't you think?

Another benefit of the hierarchy, and it's not the least one, is you can make Work Items interacting each other automatically.
For instance:

When a developer starts a task by setting it active, the parent Change Requests turn to active too (and your project leader knows by email that a development is starting).
When all the tasks are closed, the owner Change Request becomes Resolved, and is waiting for approval from the Testing Team to be Closed.
There are many other examples we could mention, like being aware when an Issue you created was solved, knowing that you have to start a Code Review, knowing your code was approved and you can check-in, etc.

Work Items, an urgent need of evolution!

loicbaumann — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 13:05:00 GMT

The development team I'm working on moved to Team System in September 2006. The shift from what we used before was pretty huge, mainly because we weren't using SCM at all ("WinMerge rulez!" you may say).

Of course, things had to evolve smoothly, and I can say it did pretty well!

First we started using the Source Control part, discovering the many benefits of the Shelve feature (backup, code review helper) and the Workspace one (working on different versions at the same time became something easy).

The next step was introducing the notion of Work Items in our development.
I customized the CMMI Process Template, it was more a slaughter than a customization, I remove many WITs to keep only Task, Review and Bug. I also removed many fields "too complicated for us".
One of the great feature of Team System is you can keep on customizing your existing projects, your process evolves as your development does, thanks to the feedback of your teams.

Anyway, when everybody started being comfortable with these WITs, as I just didn't wanted them to lay back and finally "stopping learning this Team System thing and start coding again!!!", I planned a major evolution of the whole thing.

Our goal, like many companies, is to progress in the CMMI certification, so I have to introduce more "CMMI proofed stuffs" in our project.

So I bring back "Change Request" (how could we've lived without it?) and "Issue" (because the life of a programmer is not always that easy...).

So here we are, using five types of Work Item: Task, Change Request, Bug, Issue and Review.

One thing immediately stroked me: all these types are for specific purpose, but the instances should "somewhere" be related, and because they're used by different people (product leader, team leaders, developers) they should ease the communication in our team (and by ease, I mean things should be automatic).

All I was seeing in Team System is a bunch of Work Items, related with an iteration of development, a specific area of our project and Work Item Queries that returns already a lot of results where it's hard to find what you're looking for!

I think we can do better than that, don't you? :)

See you at the next post!