Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 12

Using Reports, Portals, and Dashboards

What's In This Chapter?

• Understanding Team Foundation Server data stores
• Understanding the reporting tools available
• Creating and customizing reports using Excel
• Creating Report Definition Language (RDL) reports with Report Designer and Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS)

Capturing information throughout the project is critical not only to project managers but to all team members. Equally important is the capability to analyze the information that was captured and understand it. With Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012, the mundane tasks associated with capturing is mostly automated, and gives crucial time back to the team to focus on building software rather than capturing information associated with building it.

The agile planning tooling discussed in Chapter 11 shows ways in which you can use the real-time data from work items to help track work and plan sprints, but Team Foundation Server also provides powerful features used to analyze the data and understand it. All types of data are captured about the software development process, not just work progress but data about version control, build, test and feedback. Tracking a project and monitoring it throughout its lifecycle is made easy with Team Foundation Server Reporting and the dashboards.

This chapter examines the reporting capabilities of Team Foundation Server, working with reports, customizing reports, and the reviewing of reports shipped out-of-the ...