We are proud to present the new release for the TFS Automated Servicing and Administration Platform (TFS ASAP) powered by AIT. Beside some minor bug fixes, this version supports the update 5 of Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2013 and the TFS 2015 RTM. In addition there are two new automations available!
TFS ASAP is a reliable platform for advanced administration and extensions of Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server. It serves as a central management location for server-side event-based and scheduled automations such as aggregations as well as administrative extensions such as self-service team project creation and configuration web pages.
At http://www.tfsasap.com/editions.html there is an overview of all available features. The first new feature is called “Remaining work automation”. It has already been released for TFS ASAP online, our free of charge version for Visual Studio Online. This feature has already been explained in a former blog post. There is already an automation for basic calculations (adding to field values for example) in TFS ASAP. The new feature, called “Advanced numeric calculation”, is taking this one step further. It is now possible to extend calculations by using constants, thresholds and weightings for each parameter. Additionally a maximum value for the calculation result can be defined. But why?
There are use cases where the priority of a work item depends on multiple values. A bug for example can be evaluated by multiplying its severity, frequency and relevance. But the three parameters may not be equivalent to each other. So the values must be weighted. This can be achieved by defining a weight-factor for each parameter. If there must be thresholds for one or more parameters the can also be configured. If one threshold is exceeded or undershot, the calculation result is set to a predefined value. In the case of a defect the calculation could be configured to set the maximum priority if the severity reaches its maximum, no matter what the other two values are. In the following figure the effect of using the threshold can be seen. Changing one parameter can move an item from the last to the first position in your backlog.
Rank = Severity * Frequency * Relevance
Rank_max = 100
Relevance_Threshold > 4
As this automation can contain some of your companies’ business logic it is a very powerful feature. Prioritizing your backlog regarding multiple key figures can be a big step towards a more efficient software development process. Do you want to know how to increase the number of omitted activities by using TFS ASAP? Visit the homepage at http://tfsasap.com or contact us at [email protected].
For those who are already using Visual Studio Online, there is our online version TFS ASAP online. This one is free of charge and does not require any installation. To take a closer look at TFS ASAP online please visit http://tfsasaponline.aitag.com.