We receive a lot of quality feedback directly from customers and we use that information help direct our investments in bug fixing and testing. One of the tools we use to collect customer feedback is called "Dr. Watson". All of our applications are instrumented to observe any unexpected condition - crash, exception, internal error,...
We've now got 4 recent TFS Channel 9 videos posted on MSDN. They are interviews with various team members across the TFS team. They are: Branching 101 with Doug Neumann - Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Doug is one of the two group program managers on TFS and is responsible for Version Control, Build, Migration & Interoper...
I went on vacation for a few days this week and lo and behold while I'm gone the team has released our next version of the TFS Power Tools (formerly Power Toys). We've numbered it Version 1.2 but I prefer to refer to it as the Feb '07 release. There's a grab bag of new stuff in this release, including: You can download t...
The goal of our stress testing is to run an application under load for an extended period of time and capture all "failures". The purpose is to uncover race conditions, long term resource leaks, and bugs that only occur as the result of unexpected sequences or combinations of operations. Mostly we focus on server stress testing, but som...
For a while now I've been seeing people struggling with some TFS SP1 install issues and I've been silent about it for too long. I was waiting for my team to investigate the issues and compile a summary. I appologize for not speaking up about it sooner. The vast majority of issues come down to a tool we have called TFSQuiesce.exe.&...
Overall, it's been a pretty uneventful month for the dogfood server. The biggest milestone is that we are now consistently over 1,000 active users on the system. Files & Folders are approaching the 100M mark and should hit it within the next few months for sure. I've added a new statistic this month - Merge history. That's how...
If you read my blog much, then you know performance and scale are near and dear to my heart. If you read back far enough in my blog, you'll find a bunch of information on my philosphy of performance testing and what we've done for TFS. I'm going to repeat some of it here but if want more detail, I've included a map of previous posts at ...
We continue to make progress testing TFS for the upcoming Daylight Savings Time changes. In an earlier post, I included details and links to information about the change and its affect on other Microsoft software. Our testing has uncovered the following 2 issues. Neither of these issues are particularly serious as all of...
As I described in my last article, our first layer of quality assessment is build "scouting", designed to do a shallow but broad pass across the product to determine if it's worthwhile to proceed with deeper testing. Our next layer is more thorough automated testing runs. Many would call this "functional" testing but words in the testing spac...
Over the past several months my blog has transformed into more of an announcement forum. And while that's a service I'm happy to provide, I'm not satisfied with it. I want to exchange ideas and share thoughts about topics all (ok, maybe many) software developers and teams care about. It'll probably take the form of talking about th...
