Author Archives: Jeff Levinson

About Jeff Levinson

Jeff Levinson is the Application Lifecycle Management Practice Lead for Northwest Cadence. He has a Masters in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and holds the following credentials: MCP, MCAD, MCSD, MCDBA, MCTS, MCT, SCJP, Security+, CTT+ and is a Certified Scrum Master (CSM). He is the author of three books dealing with software development: Building Client/Server Applications with VB.NET, Pro Visual Studio 2005 Team System, Pro Visual Studio Team System with Database Professionals. He has written several articles for Visual Studio Magazine, writes a twice-monthly column for VSM Online and is a regular speaker at industry events (VS Live! & Tech Ed). Jeff is formerly a Solution Design & Integration Architect for The Boeing Company and is a Microsoft Team System MVP.

Migrating from ClearQuest to TFS 2010

The Integration Mapping Platform is the preferred method for moving from CQ to TFS. Moving any other way is suicide. The integration platform, out of the box, provides great information on doing a one to one migration from CQ to … Continue reading

Posted in ClearQuest, TFS Integration Platform, Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Manual Testing Code Coverage–Yeah!

Much asked for and incredibly helpful but missing in Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Test Manager 2010 was code coverage for manual testing. In Visual Studio vNext (and Microsoft Test Manager vNext) it’s available out of the box. To enable … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Dev11 Preview is out–First in a series

Want to know what’s coming in TFS and VS vNext? Microsoft released a CTP of the tools at //Build and we’ve got them! We’re playing with the new features and wanted to share some of the cool new items with … Continue reading

Posted in Dev11, Dev11 Preview, Feedback Manager, Visual Studio ALM, Visual Studio vNext | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

When iterative development causes problems

I should start off by saying that I’m a big fan of Scrum “but”. Scrum imposes strict limits on a number of areas and absolutely requires a number of things being done. And by not doing them you are setting … Continue reading

Posted in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Kanban, Lean, Practices, Process, Scrum, Team Foundation Server | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Constructing the iteration path in TFS

I had a situation where I had to go directly into the database and determine the work items that fell into a certain category and where they showed up on my long range plan (which iteration). It turns out that … Continue reading

Posted in Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio ALM | Tagged | 4 Comments

First release of the community build tools

Microsoft MVP’s and community contributors announced the first release of the TFS 2010 Work Flow community build activities and Actions. The plan is to ship every two to three months after another update next month (August). Download the tools from … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

TF51005: The query references a field that does not exist

So, I was uploading a process template the other day and got this error and could not figure out the reason why for the life of me: 2011-05-24T11:14:55 | Module: Work Item Tracking | Thread: 29 | The following query … Continue reading

Posted in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server | Tagged , | 1 Comment

TFS SP1 and Lab Management–wait for the QFE – FIXED

——————————————————————————————- Update: Microsoft released a QFE to address the issue outlined below. Here is a summary of the list of issues fixed by the QFE, to help you decide whether you should apply the QFE: Issue 1: When you run … Continue reading

Posted in Coded UI, Microsoft Test Manager, Software Testing, SP1, Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio Lab Management, VS2010 | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Screenshot on Test Failure

Neeraja Reddy from the testing team at Microsoft just provided a pretty cool code snippet to perform a screencapture – programmatically of a failed test: [TestCleanup()] public void MyTestCleanup() {     if (TestContext.CurrentTestOutcome == UnitTestOutcome.Failed)     {         Image img … Continue reading

Posted in Coded UI, Software Testing, Team Foundation Server | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

First post back–read the latest books

Okay, it’s been a very long while since I’ve blogged but one of my new co-works, Martin Hinshelwood, who won the ALM MVP of the year award (in part because he’s an awesome blogger). So, he re-did our blog site … Continue reading

Posted in Software Testing, Visual Studio Team System, VS2010 | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Installing MOSS on Windows Server 2008 R2

You may be playing with the new TFS 2010 Beta 2 bits. You may also be playing with MOSS 2007. And you may be doing it all on Windows Server 2008 R2 which is a rocking operating system. However, you … Continue reading

Posted in Team Foundation Server, VS2010 | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

We’re Speaking At Tech Ed!

Both Steven Borg and I will be speaking for a combined total of 4 sessions and 1 pre-con. The pre-con session is PRC05: Improve Your Software Development: Real World Solutions with Team System 2008. We’ll be discussing solutions that our … Continue reading

Posted in Event, Featured, Practices | Leave a comment

Issues with Alerts in TFS

Every once in a while we get customers who note issues with alerts. In some cases alerts are being duplicated, items don’t show up in the alerts editor, by default you can only see alerts for yourself, etc. This makes … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Practical Process Improvement (Part 5)

The first four posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) dealt with working through a process for handling bugs and improving that process. But what about preventing bugs to begin with? In this part I’ll talk about some … Continue reading

Posted in Practices, Process, Requirements | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Practical Process Improvement (Part 4)

In the previous two posts (Part 2 and Part 3) I covered an ideal bug process and the metrics you gather from the process. In this post I’ll start talking about how to use those metrics to really improve the … Continue reading

Posted in Featured, Practices, Process | Tagged , , | 5 Comments