1. VSTO Bug Tracker : The Data

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For my TechEd demo today, I will be showing a solution that helps me to do part of my job as a development manager: tracking the bug counts in the product.  At Microsoft, we have an internal system that tracks a ton of relevant bug stats in TFS and takes a snapshot of various key metrics in that system every day—for example, active bugs for a team on a given day day.  I will be writing a solution that brings that bug data into Excel and Word using VSTO so it can be further analyzed.  Ways I can analyze it in Excel will include using Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts against the data, grabbing this data to use in custom formulas in Excel, etc.  In Word, I can create nicely formatted bug mail that I can then send to the team.

First, a bit more about the bug data.   The bug data is tracked in a table that has these columns: Team, Column, Date, and Value.

Team – The team we are tracking bugs for.  On my team I have 5 teams I track bugs for:

  • Project - VSTA
  • Project - Office Server
  • Project - Office Client
  • Project - Pro Tools
  • Project - VBA

Column – The name of the bug statistic being tracked.  Some examples:

  • Active – number of active bugs on a given day
  • Resolved Fixed Rate (7 Day) – the 7 day average of bugs that were resolved fixed
  • Resolved Rate (7 Day) – the 7 day average of total bugs were resolved (some bugs may be resolved without having an actual fix occur, for example because they are duplicate bugs)
  • Incoming Rate (7 Day) – the 7 day average of bugs that were opened

Date– The date the bug statistic was gathered. 

Value – The value for the bug statistic on a given day, for example Active bugs for a particular team is 50 on a particular date.

So, for my particular team, if I want to know the Active bug count for VSTA on May 1st, I would get back this set of values—this row in the table.

 <Team>Project - VSTA</Team>
<Column>Active</Column>
<Date>5/1/2009</Date>
<Value>98</Value>