Getting Started by Creating a Project Workbook

Project managers like lists. Lists keep you focused and consistent, and checking items off your list when your team accomplishes a task feels good. Visual Studio Team System does a great job with lists, as we observed in previous chapters when we learned about work items and work item queries. Using Visual Studio Team System, you can maintain lists of tasks, risks, bugs, issues, and requirements, and because of the customizable nature of work items, you can literally create lists of just about anything you like. The work item queries help you organize our lists to facilitate our quick finding and manipulation of information. Most project managers, however, do not necessarily work with Visual Studio on a regular basis, and for that reason, Microsoft provides support for the use of Office Excel and Office Project to help manage work items on your project.

Creating a Workbook

One of the first things that you should do when you begin working on a new project in Visual Studio Team System is to create a project workbook in Office Excel. This will be the main document you will use to interact with work items. The project workbook will act as a single file that contains full access to work items within your Team Project. The project workbook will be a very simple Office Excel workbook that has one worksheet for every work item query you would normally use to manage your projects.

To create a project workbook, perform the following steps:

1. Launch Office Excel and create a new workbook.

2. From the Team menu, select New List to display the Connect To Team Foundation Server dialog box.

3. Choose the Team Project you want to create a project workbook for and click OK.

4. In the resulting New List dialog box, choose All Tasks from the Query List drop-down list and click OK.

5. From a project management perspective, you will likely want to see some additional columns in your task list. Select Choose Columns from the Team menu in Office Excel to add the following columns to your list: Area Path, Exit Criteria, Issue, Priority, Reason, and Triage. Select these fields in the Available columns list in the Choose Columns dialog box, and then click the > button to add them to the Selected columns list. You can reorder the columns in any way that makes sense to you. Click OK when you are finished adding and rearranging fields. You can also click Add Required to quickly add all required fields to the list of displayed fields.

6. In Office Excel, choose Format | Sheet | Rename, and then rename the worksheet .

7. Save the worksheet to a desired location. Choose the location based on how you will use the worksheet. If you will be using the worksheet in situations when you will not be connected to Visual Studio Team System, save the workbook to your local computer. Otherwise, save it to your project portal.

8. Repeat steps 1–7 for all other queries you would like to have available to you within Office Excel such as All Issues, All Quality of Service Requirements, All Scenarios, My Tasks, Resolved Bugs, and Untriaged Bugs.

   Note 

   You will not be prompted to connect to a Team Project if you are creating lists in the same workbook because the Team Project you specified in step 3 will be used for all subsequent lists you create in the workbook. This means, however, that you cannot have lists from different Team Projects in the same workbook.

Instead of having one list for every work item query, it is also common to have one master list of all work items by referring to the All Work Items query and then adding all required fields as you did in the preceding steps. You will be able to use Office Excel column filters and sorting capabilities to filter and organize the work items on the worksheet. For example, to see all active tasks from a list, select the Task in the Work Item Type column filter (the drop-down box automatically added to each column heading in the list created for you during the steps described above) and Active from the State column filter.