Reports (Agile)

You can analyze the progress and quality of your project by using the reports in SQL Server Reporting Services. These reports are provided with the process template for MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0. These reports aggregate metrics from work items, version control, test results, and builds. These reports answer questions about the actual state of your project.

Most of these reports provide filters that you can use to specify contents to include in the report. Filters include time period, iteration and area paths, work item types, and work item states. The questions that they answer relate to all types of work items such as user stories, test cases, tasks, and bugs.

Note

For you to access the reports that this topic describes, the team project collection that contains your team project must be provisioned with SQL Server Reporting Services. These reports are not available if Report Reports does not appear when you open Team Explorer and expand your team project node. 

Also, to view these reports, you must be assigned or belong to a group that has been assigned the Browser or Team Foundation Content Manager role in Reporting Services. For more information, see Add Users to Team Projects or Managing Permissions.

In this topic

  • Monitoring Project Health and Team Progress

  • Accessing the Reports

  • Refreshing a Report

  • Managing and Working with Published Reports

  • Customizing Reports and Related Tasks

You can access a report from the Report Reports folder, as the following illustration shows.

Reports Folder

Monitoring Team Progress and Project Health

You can use the reports in the following table to help track team progress and the overall quality of the team project.

Tasks

Related content

Monitor bug activity, reactivations, and trends. You can use bug reports to track the bugs that the team is finding and the progress that the team is making toward fixing them.

Monitor build activity, success, and trends. You can use build reports to track the quality and success of your team's builds over time.

Track project health, team burn rate, and story and task completion.

You can use the Stories Progress report to review the level of effort that the team has spent on each user story that the team is implementing. By using this report, you can quickly determine whether any work was recently completed on each story and what work is remaining.

You can use the Stories Overview report to help you track how far each user story has been implemented and tested. You can review this report daily or weekly to monitor the progress of the team during an iteration.

Determine added work. You can use the Unplanned Work report to determine how much work the team added to an iteration after it started.

Monitor testing activity. You can use the test reports to track the team's progress toward developing test cases and to determine how well they cover the user stories.

Accessing the Reports

You can access SQL Server Reporting Services reports from Team Explorer, your team project portal, or Internet Explorer. You can find other reports, which use Office Excel, in Team Explorer under the Documents folder. For more information about these reports, see Excel Reports (Agile).

Note

If a red X icon appears on the Reports node in Team Explorer, you might not have permissions to access the reports or Team Explorer might have lost communication with the server that hosts SQL Server Reporting Services. In these instances, check with your project administrator to make sure that you have permissions to access the reports node and that the server that hosts Reporting Services is running.

The red X icon might appear on the Reports node if both of the following conditions are true:

  • If Team Explorer is running on the same computer as SQL Server Reporting Services

  • You are not logged on as the administrator, or enhanced security is enabled for Internet Explorer.

To correct this issue, log onto your computer as an administrator, or open Internet Explorer, open Internet Options, click the Security tab, and clear the Enabled Protected Mode check box.

To access a report

  1. Open Team Explorer, and connect to the project collection that contains the team project for which the reports are defined.

    For more information, see Connect to and Access Team Projects in Team Foundation Server.

  2. Expand your team project node, expand Report Reports, and then expand Bugs, Build, Project Management, or Test.

    Note

    If you are using an earlier version of Team Explorer, the Report Reports node may not appear. To access the report, open a Web browser, and type the address of the server that is running SQL Server Reporting Services for your team project. For example, type http://ReportServerName/reports in the address bar, click the Team Foundation Server Reports folder, click the folder of the team project collection for your team project, and then click the folder for your team project.

    As an alternative, you can access Reports from Team Web Access.

  3. Double-click the report that you want to view.

Refreshing the Report

The following table describes how you can refresh the report.

Note

When you change a database record that tracks a work item, you encounter a latency period for when the changes appear in a report that Reporting Services generates. Report data is derived from the data warehouse. For more information, see Change a Process Control Setting for the Data Warehouse or Analysis Services Cube.

Option

Result

Refresh button on the browser window

Refreshes the display with the report that is stored in the session cache. A session cache is created when a user opens a report. Reporting Services uses browser sessions to maintain a consistent viewing experience when a report is open.

Refresh report

Causes the server that is running Reporting Services to rerun the query and update report data if the report runs on-demand. If the report is cached or a snapshot, the report that is stored in the report server database appears.

CTRL+F5 keyboard combination

Produces the same result as clicking Refresh on the report toolbar.

Managing and Working with Published Reports

You can also perform the following tasks when you view a report in Reporting Services:

  • Zoom in or out of the report.

  • Search for text that the report contains.

  • Open a related report.

  • Export the report to another format such as XML, CSV, PDF, MHTML, Excel, TIFF, or Word.

  • Refresh the report.

  • Print the report.

  • Create a subscription for the report.

For more information, see this topic on the Microsoft Web: Report Manager How-to Topics.Managing and Working with Published Reports

Tasks

Related content

Define reports that support your project tracking requirements. Depending on the process template that you used to create your team project, you might have several reports already defined. You can customize these reports further or create other reports. These custom reports might contain data fields that you added to work item types.

Add fields or modify reporting attributes of existing fields. You use work item fields to track data for a type of work item, to define the query criteria, and to filter reports. To support reporting, you can add fields or change the attributes of existing fields. When you add or modify fields, you can apply systematic naming conventions to make sure that data is logically grouped into folders in the SQL Server Analysis Services cube.

Generate PivotTable and PivotChart reports from work item queries. To generate reports that show current status or a historical trend, you use the Create a Report in Microsoft Excel tool to quickly generate reports that are based on a work item query. These reports access data that is stored in the Analysis Services cube.

Aggregate data to show team progress. You can track your team's progress more easily by creating reports that aggregate data from Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) into charts and tables. For example, you can create a report that shows how many active work items are assigned to each person on the team. To create this kind of report, you use Report Designer in SQL Server and the Analysis Services cube.

Change how frequently the data warehouse is refreshed. The default properties for the data warehouse are set when Visual Studio Team Foundation Server is installed. You can change how frequently the data is updated in the data warehouse and the security settings that control user access to the data warehouse.

See Also

Concepts

Dashboards (Agile)

Artifacts (Agile)

Other Resources

MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0

Excel Reports (Agile)