TeamPulse Helps Your Team Follow Best Practices

One of the features that has inspired the TeamPulse team over the years is Static Code Analysis. In Visual Studio 2010 (Premium and higher) you have the ability to have Visual Studio perform a check on your code to see how well your code conforms to different coding best practices. You can have Visual Studio check for how to best declare error handlers, or even making sure that you dispose of your objects before they go out of scope - it’s like having a fully automated code review without the need for anyone to actually review your code. What’s great about features like Static Code Analysis is that it helps catch issues early versus later – allowing your team to get into the habit of following these best practices all the time.

Static Code Analysis Equivalent for Agile Projects?

Implementing checks for Best Practices on a Software Project was something we wanted to strive for with TeamPulse. We wondered what it would be like to have the application check our projects looking for conditions that may be of a concern to a team.

The result is the Best Practice Analyzer in TeamPulse.

In short, the Best Practice Analyzer will take a look at your project for some very specific conditions. The initial version of TeamPulse will ship with the following rules:

1. Current Iteration Has Stories with No Estimates: All stories assigned to the current iteration should have an estimate.
2. Current Stories are Low Certainty: Stories that are about to be development, should not have a low certainty attribute.
3. Current Stories are Low Maturity: Stories that are about to be developed should not have a low maturity attribute.
4. Current Tasks have No Estimates: All tasks should have an estimate.
5. Previous Iterations Contain Work in Progress: Past iterations/sprints still have work that has not been closed, this could be dangerous as sometimes teams forget about bringing work forward and ultimately lose track of the work.

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When you perform a project analysis the results are displayed in the analysis results grid. To address an issue found by the Best Practice Analyzer, all you have to do is click on the icon associated with the finding, and TeamPulse will take you directly to the subject of the issue. The analysis results will be saved for your project until the next time you perform the analysis, and of course, you’ll have the ability to export the results to HTML, Word, CSV, or ExcelML.

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Version 1 is shipping with 5 Best Practices, however, we’ve made sure to make this feature extensible. We’ll be continually adding more and more Best Practices to the product and we’re also going to make it easy for you to write your own best practices.

Let us know what you think! If you have any Best Practices you would like to see TeamPulse implement, please let us know.

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Don’t forget about our Launch Webcast happening on the 27^{th to see all the great features of TeamPulse}! Register now!