1.  Mehdi Khalili
 Consultant at Readify
 Code, lead and mentor by day
 Blog and hack on OSS by night
 Blog: www.mehdi-khalili.com
 Twitter: @MehdiKhalili

2.  ALM
 ALM the TFS way
 Team Collections and Team Projects
 Version Control and branching
 Build Automation
 Work Item Tracking
 Team Collaboration Using Portal
 Web Access!
 Putting it all together

3. There may be glitches in demos due to our virtual setup
This is not a TFS only talk. We are going to talk about ALM and
software processes and methodologies

7.  A quick tour of our virtual environment
 Windows Server 2008
 SQL Server 2008 R2
▪ Database
▪ Reporting Services
▪ Analysis Services
 Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
 Team Foundation Server 2010
 Visual Studio 2010 Premium

8. What is it?

9.  “continuous process of managing the life of
an application”
 Increases productivity
 Improves quality
 Accelerates development through simplified
integration
 Cuts maintenance time
 Maximizes investments
 Increases flexibility
 …

10.  Build management
 Release/deployment
 Testing
 Requirements management
 Work item management
 Project management
 Change management
 Configuration management
 ….

11. The most integrated ALM solution
in .Net land

13.  A quick tour of the Administration Console
 Application Tier
 Team Project Collections
▪ Team Projects
▪ SharePoint portal
▪ Reporting
 Build Configurations
▪ Build Controllers
▪ Build Agents

14.  The basic unit of recovery
 One database per collection
 Benefits
 Scalability: load balance
 Backup and recovery
 Security isolation
 Information sharing
 Organizational/team structure

15.  The largest unit of work associated with
developing a single product or product line
 Each collection can have many team projects

16.  Creating Team Projects is time consuming
 Per Team Project you will get
 Milestones and release schedules
 Areas and Iterations
 Version Control Settings
 ALM methodology
 Process Template and its customization
 Portal

17.  CMMI
 Agile
 Scrum

18. Work Item Comparison
Agile Scrum
Bug Bug
Issue Impediment
User Story Product Backlog Item
Task Task
N/A Sprint

19. User Story vs. PBI
User Story Product Backlog Item
Title Title
Description Description
Rank Backlog Priority
Story Points Effort
Business Value Business Value
Acceptance Criteria Acceptance Criteria

20.  Off to Team Explorer

21.  Customize a project’s template
 Customize Project Template

23. AKA Source Control Management

24.  A journal of changes to your code
 All actions are irreversible: if you make a
mistake you can only reverse it by
compensating actions (well, except in git which allows you
to rewrite the history – oh yeah)

25.  Atomic check-ins
 Branching and merging
 Shelving
 Labeling
 Concurrent check-outs
 Check-in policies
 Association of check-ins with work items

26.  Add a project to source control
 Workspaces
 Get a project
 Get latest
 Get specific
 Check-in
 Check-out and Lock!!!
 Undo changes
 Shelve-sets: shelving and unshelving
 Move
 …and Source Control File Types

27.  Check-out settings
 Bringing VSS annoyance to TFS!!
 Check-in policy
 Some useful policies
 And some are unnecessary and annoying
 Check-in notes

28. The Dark Side
of
Version Control!

29.  Feature branch
 Dev branch
 Release branch
 Hotfix branch
 Integration isolation
 Technology specific branch

31.  Create a branch
 Make some changes on the branch
 Merge changes back
 Make some changes on the branch
 Make some changes on the mainline
 Merge changes and resolve the conflict

32.  “No Branching”, Says Me
 But if you REALLY need branching at least do it on demand
 And then do your best to remove the demand ;-)

33.  Create a label on the release
 Do NOT create a branch
 If you need to fix some bugs on the release
branch off the label
 Do NOT forget to merge your changes back

34.  Chrome with hundreds of millions of users is
released every six weeks
 Chrome Canary is released once a day
 Flickr with hundreds of millions of users
deploys to production 10 times a day

37.  You need to maintain workable Mainline
 You want to check-in frequently
 Conflicting needs
 Feature branching seems like the solution

38. From Feature Branching By Martin Fowler

39.  Make your features small
 Have very few features in progress
 Do not create developer silos
 Branching is painful. You may reduce the
pain; but it is always going to hurt

40.  Avoid branching using
 Smaller features
 Shorter sprints
 Feature Toggle
 Branch By Abstraction
 … but sometimes you just HAVE to create a
branch. That is ok because it should not
happen often

41. The relief we are after

42.  Integrate your work frequently
 Everyone checks into Mainline on daily basis
 Every commit should be built
 Builds should include test runs
 Keep the build fast
 Keep your tests fast
 Use CI to drive your Automated Deployment

43.  With or without branches, please
continuously integrate back and forward
 And do not forget: Mainline is the king!
From Feature Branching By Martin Fowler

44.  AKA baseless merge in TFS land
 Only doable through command prompt
 This is not a good ideausually
 And we never talked about it – alright?!

45.  Offline Mode
 Source History
 Code Annotation
 Diff tools
 Comparing files
 Comparing folders
 Merge tools
 Two way merge
 Three way merge

46. This is an important part of
Continuous Integration

47.  Several triggers:
 Manual
 CI
 Rolling Builds
 Gated Check-In
 Scheduled
 From MSBuild in 2008 to WF in 2010
 Some are happy and some like me are sad pandas

48.  Manual: most useful for deployment builds
 CI: Good for CI
 Rolling Build: Useful when you have a big
team and devs check-in very frequently
 Gated Check-In: Useful for junior teams and
for your Mainline if you have many branches
 Schedule: useful for functional tests, nightly
builds, …

50.  Install TFS on your agent machine
 Set it up as an agent for the build controller
 Give your agents good names
 Optionally give it some tags
 You can use tags in your build definition
 Or when you queue the build
 You can see a list of controllers and agents
from team explorer

51.  You can queue
 The latest code
 A shelveset
 A changeset
 A label

52.  Test result
 Broken test could break the build
 Keeping a build result around
 Build Log
 MSBuild Log
 Drop folder
 Build folder

53.  Get (late) notifications on builds
 Desktop notification from TFS
 Do not rely on it; but having it could help

54. Remember Chrome and Flickr
If you want to win you should do the same

55. Short Happy
Continuous Feedback
Integration Cycle Customer
Continuous Continuous
Testing Delivery

56.  No matter how big your application is, if your
deployment takes more than a minute to
trigger you are doing it wrong
 Some cool tools:
 MSDeploy
 TFSDeployer

57.  You need to apply database transformation
as part of your push-button deployment
 Some cool tools
 MigratorDotNet
 DBUP

58.  Different environments have different
settings
 To create push-button deployment you need
to easily apply config transformations
 Some cool tools
 CodeAssassin.ConfigTransform
 SlowCheetah

59. No CMMI Please!

60.  Integrated work item tracking system
 Integration with Version Control
 Requirements, tasks, bugs, issues, test cases
 Extensible:
 Create your custom fields
 Change the layout
 Available states
 State transitions

61.  Create a sprint
 Create iterations and areas
 Create Product Backlog Item/Story
 Create tasks and subtasks
 Create bugs
 Create impediments
 Check-in code against a backlog item
 Create custom queries

62.  Editing multiple entries at once
 Populating your backlog

63.  Backlog is a living creature!!
 If your backlog is not growing your product is
dead
 Backlog MUST be always prioritized
 Do not forget to groom your backlog
 The Team should help PO groom the backlog
 Prioritize your backlog
 Backlog MUST be always prioritized

65. Customer Preferences
 Attractive
 One-Dimensional
 Must-Be
 Indifferent
 Reverse

67.  Deny is THE king
 And then there are administrators
▪ Project Collection Administrators
▪ Project Administrators
▪ Team Foundation Administrators
 Allow is the king in the absence of Deny
 Unset means denied unless stated otherwise
 This is where inheritance shines

68.  Administer warehouse
 Create team project collection
 Delete team project collection
 Edit instance-level information
 Make requests on behalf of others
 Trigger Events
 Use full Web Access features
 View instance-level information

69.  SharePoint Web Application Services
 Team Foundation Administrators
 Team Foundation Service Accounts
 Team Foundation Valid Users
 Work Item Only View Users

70.  Administer shelved changes
 Administer workspaces
 Create a workspace
 Create new projects
 Delete team project
 Manage process template
 Manage build resources
 Delete team project collection
 ….

71.  Project Collection Administrators
 Project Collection Service Accounts
 Project Collection Build Administrators
 Project Collection Build Service Accounts
 Project Collection Valid Users
 Collection Proxy Service Accounts
 Project Collection Test Service Accounts

72.  Project Administrators
 Contributors
 Readers
 Builders

73.  Permission Levels:
 Project
 Build
 Work Item Query
 Areas
 Iterations
 Version Control
 And each has very granular permissions

74.  Create different AD groups for different roles
 TFS has to be granular to suit every need
 Do not over specify – a few groups would
usually suffice
 Do not lock it in: adapt as need arises

76.  Project documents and requirements
 Process Guidance
 Dashboard with reports about ongoing things
 Wiki
 Some versioning goodness

77.  Announcements
 Contacts
 Discussion Boards
 Out of TFS Tasks
 Surveys
 ….
 RSS subscriptions
 Alerts

78.  Environment Lists: Name, status, URLs,
current release info, access details if need be
 Active Risks
 Sprint info: sprint No., goal, start and end
dates, daily stand-up location and time,
review location and time
 Project Glossary
 Important Dates
 Contacts

80.  Create/Edit Work Items and Work Item
Queries
 Create/Edit Areas and Iterations
 Read-only access to Version Control
 Access to Team Build
 A Work Item Only View (doesn't require CAL)

82.  Your work items (or any work item) changes
 Or a work item is assigned to you
 Or a new work item is created
 Build Quality Changes
 Or a build completes
 Or it fails
 Anything is checked in
 Or there is a check-in on a specific file
 Or a folder
 Or a file extension
 Or when a check-in policy is overridden

85.  Roles  Ceremonies
 Product Owner  Sprint planning
 ScrumMaster  Daily standup
 The Team  Sprint review
 Sprint retrospective
 Documents
 Product backlog
 Sprint backlog
 Burndown charts

86. All that said ...

87.  There is no silver bullet - NEVER
 … and TFS is no exception
 A good process succeeds regardless of tools
 To succeed we should
 Be transparent
 Inspect
 Adapt
 Get as much feedback as frequently as possible
 … and the tool comes next

88. Let’s run a project!

89.  git-tfs and posh-git
 Team Foundation Sidekicks
 Team Foundation Power Tools
 Telerik’s TFS Project Dashboard
 TFS Integration Tools
 TFS Administration Tools
 Just search for them

90. Q&A

91.  TFS Permissions:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms252587(v=vs.100).aspx
 VS TFS Branching Guidance:
http://vsarbranchingguide.codeplex.com/
 Continuous Integration:
http://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html
 Feature Branching:
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureBranch.html

92.  Branch By Abstraction:
http://continuousdelivery.com/2011/05/make-large-scale-
changes-incrementally-with-branch-by-abstraction/
 Feature Toggle:
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureToggle.html
 Mitigate your merge issues:
http://www.mehdi-khalili.com/mitigate-your-merge-issues

93.  MSDeploy:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WebDeploymentMadeAw
esomeIfYoureUsingXCopyYoureDoingItWrong.aspxhttp://ch
annel9.msdn.com/events/mix
 TFSDeployer:
http://tfsdeployer.codeplex.com/
 TFS Sidekicks:
http://www.attrice.info/cm/tfs/
 App and Web Config Transformation
http://www.mehdi-khalili.com/transform-app-config-and-web-config

94.  Team Foundation Power Tools:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c255a1e
4-04ba-4f68-8f4e-cd473d6b971f
 Telerik’s TFS project dashboard:
http://www.telerik.com/agile-project-management-
tools/tfs.aspx
 TFS Integration Tools:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/eb77e739-
c98c-4e36-9ead-fa115b27fefe
 TFS Administrations Tools:
http://tfsadmin.codeplex.com