Excel Services in SharePoint 2013 Prompt for Data Refresh

While working to get the various dashboards to work for the TFS 2013 Agile template I noticed the all the charts kept asking me Do you want to enable these queries.  After clicking on yes a few times this got old.  Did some digging and there is an easy way to allow them to connect to there data sources and refresh when the page loads.

Here is the message I was talking about:

To remove the warnings you will need to do the following.

1. Browse to your SharePoint Central Administration page
2. Under Application Management click on Manage service applications
3. Click on Excel Services Application
4. Click on Trusted File Locations
5. For both your short name address (http://shortname/sites) and FQDN (http://sitename.mysite.com/sites) change the Warm on Refresh setting to No/False and click on OK to save it

Happy Face!  No more click on Yes

TFS 2013 Excel Charts in SharePoint 2013 Aren't Showing Areas

I am still in process of setting up Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) as an Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) solution for a company.  All of the companies products are being managed under one Team Project and I am breaking it apart by using teams and areas.

Upon searching there was little documentation out there regarding how to set this up in SharePoint.  The best sites I found was by Martin Hinshelwood and can be found here.  In addition to the instructions listed there is some additional configuration needed for each sub-site so that it only shows the area's affected.  After the various dashboards are present several Web Parts need to have their queries adjusted by adding the area for that team to it.

Web parts that needed adjusting for the Agile template were:

• Project Work Item (right side)
• Recent Checkins (right side)
• Burndown dashboard -> Open Issues (bottom)
• Bugs dashboard -> Active Bugs (bottom)

Next I went to the Excel Reports on the left to start to modify those for each sub-site.  When I opened one up and went to select the area to match the sub-site it was not listed.  I found this odd since the area I had created was available for the queries of the web parts I changed earlier.

After some tinkering I realized that the areas for reporting off of don't show up until you have created a work item and assigned that area to it.   I created a work item and stepped away for a meeting.  When I got back and reopened the spreadsheet the area was now present.  Not knowing the inner workings of TFS I can only assume this had to be done for the area to be created in SQL Server Analysis Services cube.  If you are setting up the SharePoint sites ahead of time I would recommend you create dummy work items and get the areas populated.  That way you can reconfigure each sub-sites spreadsheets ahead of time.

Happy TFSing!

Image courtesy of  renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Story Points in Agile for Defects

Story Points for Defects

I have been working with several teams on implementing TFS as they want to follow ALM.  Currently they are doing velocity and burn up charts in a spreadsheet.  I noticed that they were assigning story points to defects.  They were doing so to help with planning as a certain percentage of the teams time is dedicated to fixing defects reported by the customer.  I started thinking about if that was the right way to go about it.

If story points are the measure of value delivered to the business or customer then defects should have a negative impact on the value.   A piece of working software with no defects has a perceived value of non-working software (defects).   Therefore fixing the defects later should be 0 story points since that “value” was already delivered to the customer in a previous release.
 Teams with better quality will have a higher velocity and teams that spend more time fixing bugs will have a lower velocity.  This may portray a more accurate picture when planning work and releases.

Your thoughts?

Image courtesy of ddpavumba / FreeDigitalPhotos.net