TeamCompanion Solution Overview. Visual Studio

Transcription

1 TeamCompanion Solution Overview Visual Studio

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3 Contents Contents... 3 Overview... 4 Enhance Personal and Team Productivity... 5 Simplify Work Item User Interfaces to Better Suit Different Project Roles... 5 Get the Most Out of Powerful Searching and Grouping Features... 6 Work on Your Project Even When Offline and Sync Later... 6 Keep up with the Latest Project Developments Using Scheduled Queries... 7 Stay Up to Date with Automatic Updates... 7 Communicate and Collaborate... 8 Link Outlook Mails, Tasks or Reminders with Work Items... 8 Manage Work Items, Work Item Queries, Reports and Documents... 9 Initiate and Track Feedback Threads Manage Agile Projects Leverage the Native Support for Agile Manage Agile Teams and their Product Backlogs Run Iterations and Track Progress Enabling the Collaboration of Stakeholder and Development Worlds System Requirements Ekobit. All rights reserved. 3 3

4 Overview TeamCompanion is a first class Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) client embedded into Microsoft Office Outlook. In addition to TFS client features, TeamCompanion leverages many built in Outlook features, providing you with unique capabilities to manage your application lifecycle in the most efficient way. TeamCompanion lets you connect to multiple TFS servers, project collections and team projects simultaneously, allowing you to interact seamlessly with all of them. It keeps your whole team on the same page, improving communication and collaboration among team members. By combining Outlook artifacts such as s, appointments or reminders, with TFS artifacts like work items, work item queries or reports, it successfully bridges the gap between the worlds of business stakeholders and development teams. This is a must-have tool that provides for increased productivity for all Outlook and TFS users. It offers many advanced ways how to accelerate and optimize your work item management tasks, track progress and stay up to date with latest project developments. With TeamCompanion you can manage your team projects with least context switching and by using the smallest possible number of tools for your daily tasks. Additionally, TeamCompanion delivers a powerful agile project management feature set with an emphasis on native support for Scrum. It helps you to competently manage teams and their backlogs, load balance resources and track progress. TeamCompanion is the only TFS client tool you need to unleash the power of your Team Projects! 2013 Ekobit. All rights reserved. 4 4

5 Enhance Personal and Team Productivity Simplify Work Item User Interfaces to Better Suit Different Project Roles Work items are core artifacts used to achieve traceability over your entire application lifecycle supported by TFS and thus contain a wealth of data. As different project roles use work items in many different scenarios, usually what they really need are particular subsets of this data. For many non-technical users, from C level managers to information workers, the standard web client and the user interface for TFS is inefficient, too complex and even intimidating. TeamCompanion implements a unique feature, unavailable in other TFS clients, which allows you to create different role based layouts for work item forms. This way, your business stakeholders can get a simplified layout containing only specific work item fields they are concerned with, while the core development team can retain the default form with all data. Simplified configurable work item views and a rich feature set, described in following chapters, makes TeamCompanion the ideal alternative primary TFS client. Team administrators are provided with a special tool to manage layouts on the level of TFS groups as well as particular TFS users Ekobit. All rights reserved. 5 5

6 Get the Most Out of Powerful Searching and Grouping Features TeamCompanion supports full-text search over all work item fields as well as advanced work item field search conditions. Highlighting of terms found in search results is visible both in the query search result list and in the HTML work item preview, which lets you quickly and easily determine why a particular work item appears in the search result. Furthermore, TeamCompanion leverages unlimited Outlook grouping abilities helping you to preview work item query results in exactly the way that suits your needs. It provides first class support for grouping of query results together with the option to add grouping information to all your team queries and unify query result views across the whole team. Work on Your Project Even When Offline and Sync Later TeamCompanion allows you to work completely offline or while being occasionally connected to your TFS. It supports these scenarios in a discreet way, making sure that you can continuously work without losing your data. It automatically detects the status of your connections and continuously adapts itself. While offline, you can browse through cached work item query results, preview work items in HTML read-only mode, and make changes to the hierarchy of work items. Once online again, you can simply save all changes made offline to TFS at once. Offline work is supported since TeamCompanion uses locally cached data. Even when working online, the majority of changes to work item fields or work item hierarchy is first saved locally. This way, TeamCompanion gives you the possibility to persist such changes locally between Outlook sessions, 2013 Ekobit. All rights reserved. 6 6

7 easily undo single or multiple changes not yet saved to the server, or commit all changes to TFS with a single action. Keep up with the Latest Project Developments Using Scheduled Queries TeamCompanion keeps you continuously up to date with project status using Outlook style discreet notifications. Instead of receiving thousands of TFS notification s about changes to work items, schedule the execution of your most important work item queries. Each time a scheduled query is executed, the current state of its query result set is retrieved from TFS. TeamCompanion is consequently able to inform you about any changes to work items included in this set in near real time and in the least intrusive way - by highlighting changed, new and unread work items in bold font in the query result list, and displaying the count of changes next to the work item query name in the Navigation Pane, the same way Outlook highlights unread s. Additionally, add your most important queries to the Outlook Favorites folder and get instant visibility into only those types of information you want to keep on your radar. In this way, you will not spend precious time searching for critical information anymore, because TeamCompanion will promptly deliver it to you. Stay Up to Date with Automatic Updates TeamCompanion is deployed using a ClickOnce installer engine that enables automatic updates. TeamCompanion automatically checks for updates, and gives you the option to delay or skip each update. If you prefer to manually check for updates, simply turn off automatic updates Ekobit. All rights reserved. 7 7

8 Communicate and Collaborate Link Outlook Mails, Tasks or Reminders with Work Items TeamCompanion efficiently bridges the gap between communication and TFS work item management. In this way it empowers various project stakeholders, particularly business ones, to work on TFS based projects, using the one tool they use for the most of their daily tasks. With just a few clicks, you can create a new work item based on an and its attachments, or attach an to an existing work item. You can easily send Done s containing feedback about implemented work items. TeamCompanion takes care of the relationship between work items and s affected by such actions and automatically transfers information between them. s become a unified part of your TFS world, always remain close to the subject of discussion and can be tracked down within TFS at any time. Since TeamCompanion treats work items as first class Outlook objects, you can quickly apply your entire Outlook experience to working with work items from within Outlook. This approach is particularly visible through the support for creating Outlook tasks from work items, adding various flags and reminders related to work items, and schedule meetings regarding work items Ekobit. All rights reserved. 8 8

9 Manage Work Items, Work Item Queries, Reports and Documents TeamCompanion is a fully featured TFS client inside Outlook with many unique enhancements. It offers full support for work item and work item query management, lets you work with SQL Server reports and access SharePoint documents. The integration with Outlook Favorites makes your queries, reports and document folders easily accessible. Using the enhanced versions of the embedded work item form, together with the HTML preview, you can create, edit and preview work items. The powerful grid based query result view and the enhanced query editor lets you manage flat and hierarchical work item queries, execute queries in various ways and group, search or customize query results. You can send work items and query results per mail or export them to Excel or Project. Additionally, you can access TFS reports from Outlook, save their customized parameters set in form of 'One Click' reports and send report results by Ekobit. All rights reserved. 9 9

10 Initiate and Track Feedback Threads TeamCompanion helps you understand and easily incorporate continuous feedback in your development process. By requesting feedback from your stakeholders and monitoring the threads of feedback requests/responses, all from within TeamCompanion, you will get the most out of the TFS feedback experience introduced with TFS You initiate the feedback request/response workflow by creating a new feedback request addressed to one or more of your project stakeholders. In case your stakeholders use TeamCompanion as well, they can initiate the feedback session directly from it. A customized work item query that fetches feedback work items and is scheduled for regular execution can help you get notified as soon as the stakeholders finish their reviews. Once the review process is over, you can further enhance reviewed features based on stakeholder feedback. With TeamCompanion you can simply create new user requirements by copying information from corresponding feedback responses. In this way you can easily keep track of the whole feedback loop and be constantly aware what the reasons for further development of a feature are Ekobit. All rights reserved. 10

11 Manage Agile Projects Leverage the Native Support for Agile TeamCompanion works out of the box with all standard TFS process templates. It is also highly configurable and can support any customized templates. TeamCompanion delivers a powerful agile project management feature set. You can leverage the native support for all agile templates, especially Scrum, being the most important among them. This includes comprehensive support for team management, backlog management, sprint planning, resource load balancing and progress tracking. TeamCompanion is fully compatible with all TFS 2013 agile project management features available as part of Web access Ekobit. All rights reserved. 11

12 Manage Agile Teams and their Product Backlogs TeamCompanion allows you to configure all aspects of your agile teams, including team membership, scope and iterations. Each team has its own product backlog which can be easily filled and maintained from within TeamCompanion. Appropriate titles that emerge from a brainstorming session are sufficient to easily capture new customer requests and quickly add them to the backlog in form of product backlog items. Drag and drop support for reordering backlog items will be very useful while refining your backlog and preparing most important items for the next sprint. Run Iterations and Track Progress TeamCompanion entirely covers the wide range of activities performed while planning and running your sprints. You start each iteration by setting its time span and adjusting team capacity, including various interruptions and team member's special capacities. The embedded velocity chart helps you plan the initial volume of work your team can implement during the sprint. Start filling your iteration backlog by dragging and dropping the appropriate items from the product to the sprint backlog. Refine the sprint scope by quickly decomposing planned work into detailed 2013 Ekobit. All rights reserved. 12

13 tasks. Just a few clicks is enough to enter the task title and remaining work estimate and add the task to the sprint backlog. All planning related changes done in the TeamCompanion s agile tools are initially saved locally. This allows you to balance the workload among team members in order to determine how your changes influence the overall project status, before saving them on the server. The built in support for 'What if Analysis' lets you easily undo single as well as multiple changes to your project plan and thus explore different scenarios. Once you optimize your planning efforts, confirm the changes by saving them on the server all at once. The real-time burndown chart, as well as various embedded statistics, help you constantly keep track of the project status and trends. Load statistics and remaining capacity charts for each team member are always up to date, which gives you great support for planning the next day during the daily standup. Even unsaved changes, like drag and drop changes to assignments, update all charts and statistics instantaneously, allowing you to run your sprints in the most efficient way Ekobit. All rights reserved. 13

14 Enabling the Collaboration of Stakeholder and Development Worlds Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, along with other Microsoft server and client products (Project Server, SCVMM, Visual Studio, Office applications and other tools), covers all ALM areas, from requirements management and application architecture to release management and IT support. TeamCompanion, with its Outlook TFS integration and the promise of taking collaboration between all software development project stakeholders to a higher level, naturally fits into the Microsoft ALM solution offering. Moreover, TeamCompanion is recommended for use by virtually all project stakeholders throughout all ALM areas. With TeamCompanion, different business stakeholders usually located outside the core development team, can access your team project in the most elegant way with least context switching. From within Outlook, they can browse all project related information, stay up to date using scheduled queries and focus on key project aspects by previewing work items through simplified layouts. Project sponsors can benefit from using one click reports to keep track of project progress with least effort. Business analysts will leverage the power of relating s with work items together with the built in support for the feedback workflow, as it will help them achieve full traceability over user requirements, project tasks, new product releases, testing efforts and bug removal. Besides using the overall TeamCompanion feature set, Product owners will especially appreciate the native support for agile project management. Our customer feedback shows that even the development teams working mainly in Visual Studio use TeamCompanion to a great extent as well. It helps them collaborate better, efficiently search through the multitude of work item data and keep in their radar just the items that are related to their current assignments. System Requirements TeamCompanion installs on Outlook 2013 and earlier versions (Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010). It works with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server TFS 2013 and earlier versions, as well as with Team Foundation Service (tfs.visualstudio.com) Ekobit. All rights reserved. 14