Using Team Foundation Server to Create a Client Contact Database: Best Practices (part 4 of 5)
Continuing a series of five posts on a project, began in 2008, by the Blackbaud Documentation team.
By: Georgeanne Cheng, Ellyn Hassell, and Lindsey Robbins
Wow! We learned a lot in this project. It's been over a year since we began and we still have more we want to do. For example, we want to streamline our process for taking survey data and entering it into our TFS customer contact database. But, before we move forward, we wanted to share what we learned along the way. Without further ado, here are our top 10 recommendations/best practices...
- Document everything you learned through the research and implementation phase.
- Post the best practices in a place where they're easy to edit and improve over time. We posted ours on an internal wiki.
- Provide a table that explains what to enter in your TFS work item fields.
- Provide as many great examples as you can. We spent a lot of time on examples to make sure they reflected the type of content we expected in the work item fields.
- Practice entering customer contact information in the form before you begin using it as a team. We discovered fields we didn't need or could improve upon when we were practicing with the form ourselves. Workflow recommendations can be ironed out at this time as well.
- What fields need to be required? When you think about this, you can determine which fields you absolutely need for form entry and which are nice to have. Having only the bare minimum required fields ensures it's a quick painless process. If you get more data, awesome but if not, at least it's better than nothing at all, which is what you'll get if you create a form with lots of required fields
- Make note of issues or hiccups you discover with the work item. For example, we discovered the following:
- When you link and and save work items, your reciprocated links may not immediately appear on the work items. You may have to close the work items and reopen them to see the links. On rare occasions, you may have to restart TFS in order for the links to appear. This is a known issue with TFS.
- You cannot delete a saved work item. You can make it obsolete.
- Create flyover text for fields. Okay, so we know not everyone is going to stop what they are entering in a work item to open up an internet browser and review the help documentation. So, we created flyover text to help users enter content in the fields.
- Create queries ahead of time for your team to use. Saved queries help prevent frustrations and headaches for users trying to find work items. We provided instructions on how to access the customer queries and how to choose what displays in the query results. We created the following queries ahead of time.
- All Contacts - Customer contact work items not tagged as obsolete.
- Contact by Source - Customer contact work items with an iteration path of Documentation/Customer Contact/Source. Sorted alphabetically by source type.
- Deleted Contacts - Obsolete customer contact work items.
- Do Not Contact - All customer contact work items with "Do not contact" selected in the Communication field.
- My Customer Contact - All customer contact work items assigned to you.
- Provide a short tutorial to your team before implementation. But, expect to help people the first few times they need to use the form. Provide reminders throughout the year to use the work item if people forget to use the database.
- Practice, play, and learn. Ideally, find an image of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 which includes Team Foundation Server. For our project, we also used Microsoft Virtual PC (to work with the image) and Visual Studio Power Tools (which gave us the Process Editor to make changes). This completely changed our project for the better. When Ellyn found the image, she was able to practice creating and modifying our work item in a safe environment. We didn't import our work item into our live environment until we were really, really ready. And by then, we had completed a lot of testing so we knew the work item was close to where we wanted it to be.
- Ask questions. We asked many questions - questions about TFS, about work items, about customized reports, about security permissions, and about what we wanted from our work item. Lots of people use TFS and provide answers on the interwebs. All you have to do is ask. We even had meetings where we had more questions than answers. It also never hurt just to ask another person in our department if they knew anything about an issue we were having. If we ran into a roadblock, we were directed to another person and to another person until the issue was resolved. You'd be amazed what you can learn and accomplish when you ask questions.
Up Next... Ellyn closes the series of blog posts with a discussion of what's next. Where do we go from here?