Update 4 RC for Release Management was released a few days ago. There are some good improvements – some are minor, like the introduction of “Agent-based” labels improves readability for viewing agent-based vs non-agent based templates and components. Others are quite significant – like being able to use the Manual Intervention activity and tags in vNext templates, being able to use server-drops as release source and others. By far my favorite new feature of the update is the new variable capabilities.
I am often asked if there is a way to see a “traceability matrix” in TFS. Different people define a “traceability matrix” in different ways. If you want to see how many tests there are for a set of requirements, then you can use SmartExcel4TFS. However, this doesn’t tell you what state the current tests are in – so you can’t see how many tests are passing / failing etc.
Unfortunately there is no TechEd Africa this year – Microsoft have opted to go for smaller, more focused sessions in multiple cities (or at least that’s what I gather). I think it’s a shame, since the TechEd Africa event was always fantastic – and who doesn’t like getting out the office for a couple of days?
Over the last couple of months I’ve done several implementations and upgrades of TFS 2013. Most organizations I work with are not developing boxed software – they’re developing websites or apps for business. The major difference is that boxed software often has more than one version of a product “in production” – some customers will be on version 1.0 while others will be on version 2.0 and so on. In this model, branches for each major version, with hot-fix branches where necessary – are a good way to keep these code bases separate while still being able to merge bug fixes across versions. However, I generally find that this is overkill for a “product” that only ever has one version in production at any one time – like internal applications or websites.
I was working at a customer that had set up a test TFS environment. When we set up their “real” TFS, they did a get-latest of their code and imported their code – easy enough. They did have about 100 active work items that they also wanted to migrate. Not being a big fan of TFS Integration Platform, I usually recommend using Excel to port work items en masse.
