Add and assign a code review task on checkin with Visual Studio + TFS 2012

[Mr. Analog]

So started playing around with this feature, you can either do it on check-in or find a changeset in your version history, right click it and assign a reviewer. The reviewer gets to see a list of differences in the files you edited from the previous version, then you can look at a code comparison side-by-side view and leave comments/annotations.

Pretty handy for assigning code review tasks to people rather easily.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Visual-Studio-2012-Premium-and-Ultimate-Overview/Visual-Studio-Ultimate-2012-Using-Code-Review-to-Improve-Quality

[Thorin]

Yeah, TFS is finally starting to be a worthwhile tool for software development.  There are a bunch of new tools to enforce a certain workflow that common sense seems to indicate enhances the chances of better software.

Being able to force a completed code review is nice.  Being able to force a test plan is created is nice.  Being able to see work items (stories, bugs, tasks for stories and bugs) on a kanban board is nice.  The TFS2012 web access is miles and miles better than the TFS2010 web access was, to the point where I use the web access now instead of the tools built into Visual Studio to do the same thing.

You know where it all falls apart, though?  When people don't use the tools.  For examples, not updating hours remaining on tasks makes the burndown chart invalid; not putting comments on tasks means teammates don't know where you're at; never assigning someone for the code review so they never get done.

[Mr. Analog]

Yep, this is an all too familiar problem without an easy solution. If you become the "chase people down" guy then nothing gets done without reinforcement, you want to make people want to work in the process.

I've worked with people who also legitimately didn't "get it" but also those who feigned ignorance hoping it would go away. For those people it got to the point where we had to set up rules actually forcing people to add comments on checkins or actually review peoples' utilization numbers at the end of each sprint making that number valuable as a review tool.

The main problem I have currently is that people are generally very bad at estimating things but since some don't put in time or in some cases accurate time (i.e. they never put in time that goes over) it's virtually impossible to learn from previous sprint velocity.

So you have someone 80% utilised but the velocity didn't change by the end of a sprint. I don't want to take the Board of Education out of retirement but I will if I have to...

One thing I did notice was that a board with 3x5" cards worked best in a busy office when you could at a glance see what people were doing, I think people got self conscious when others could see their nearly empty swimlane.