patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide Layer Diagrams (Pre Release)
Patterns and practices has put on the Visual Studio Gallery a set of layer diagrams which correspond with the Application Architecture Guidance…
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/237f823c-45b4-4f1f-b9e2-607fe66eaae7
Install the VSIX in VS2010 Ultimate and you get diagrams like these, with all the validation capabilities the layer diagram has.
And the corresponding guidance…
Very Nice work…
VS2010 TMap Testing Template | Initial Work Items #1
During the unfolding of the TMap for VS2010 process template, several pre-defined work items are created for the test organization. These work items helps the test organization to start structured test process with a Master Test Plan.
When starting a testing effort first several things needs to be in place… we need to understand the assignment, determine what we are going to test what are the risks, etc… the first four steps in the image below.
Beside these steps also decisions needs to be taken about what to test where, you don’t want to loose money by testing things twice. As described in the TMap Next book:
The type of system and/or development approach and/or test policy determine which forms of which test levels are best used. For iterative system development, for instance, a thorough acceptance test is less obvious. This is because the quality from the user perspective has already been tested in previous test levels. However, for package implementations there is a far greater emphasis on a thorough acceptance test. The risks here are focused on the implementation of the package in the organization, a typical acceptance test aspect.
So, topics covered by the master test plan can be:
All these activities are described in detail in the TMap Next book, and you also get these steps when using the TMap for VS2010 process template, as initial work items.
These Master Test Plan activities got descriptive guidance attached to it. Accessible by using Microsoft Test Manager 2010, Visual Studio 2010 or the TFS 2010 Web Access tool, helping every role, to understand the assignment, the activities and test goals.
[Microsoft Test Manager 2010 | Initial Master Test Plan Work Items with guidance]
[Visual Studio 2010 | Initial Master Test Plan Work Items with guidance]
[ TFS 2010 Web Access | Initial Master Test Plan Work Items with guidance]
So, when the project starts the guy / girl with the Test Manager role has to assign the different tasks to the right team members to complete the Master Test Plan.
In a following post [probably not the next one] some Word and Excel templates which support these tasks and can be found at the project portal. First a planned post about initial work items for planning the infrastructure.
If you want to keep up to date about TMap testing and the VS2010 process template, send me an email with your name and organization
. Beside this blog and our the TMap codeplex site we have a community of users, to exchange ideas, usages stories and additional updates of the template en testing practices.
TMap for VS2010 Testing Process Template RC published on Codeplex.
A bit later as planned, due to my broken leg.
Just checked in the RC version of the TMap for VS2010 process template…
Downloaded it from TMap.Codeplex.com.
Still a lot of work to do, specially on the documentation and reporting part [lucky me, my colleagues from Sogeti US, Sweden and other Sogeti countries are helping me]. But still, the documentation section is a very good starting point when you want to discover the TMap processes for VS2010.
Later this week I will post some more content.
Speaking at Dutch DevDays and Danish ALM Day
Will be speaking at the Dutch DevDays [about VS2010 general/practical usages] and Danish ALM Day [about TMap for VS2010] in March/April.
The Hague, The Netherlands
March 30-31, 2010
DevDays 2010
[update]
Will give the interactive session "ALM Best Practices: Modeling the Showcase Application" with @Edwb (www.edwardbakker.nl) and the session "ALM Best Practices: Testing the Showcase Application" with www.RobKuijt.nl. Rob is a real tester, who will give an interesting look in the world of the tester.
Copenhagen, Denmark
April 9, 2010
ALM Day 2010
Not as much as Brian Keller [4 weeks, 7 countries, 25+ sessions, 1 suitcase…]… looking forward to it, specially because I can travel again and almost can walk without crutches. So, I can do my talks standing with my hands on the keyboard without falling.
VS2010 Architecture Explorer Analyzers
DGML, the new VS2010 visualization technology has capabilities to render graphs. Graphs like dependencies between classes, inheritance graphs, custom graph, you actually can visualize any relation you want. Cameron Skinner has posts about DGML and Chris Lovett has some great video’s.
[class dependencies uml2doc.codeplex.com]
Now the interesting thing is that you can analyze these graphs. In the image below you see the analyzers; Circular References – Hub – Unreferenced.
The purple classes are unreferenced which probably means dead code or entry point of the application. The kind of blue-green nodes are hub, classes which are important and heavy used, and no strongly connected classes in this solution.
Make your own analyzer.
You also can make your own analyzer. For example code coverage or naming conventions or … whatever you can imaging. In the example below I created an analyzer which marks the nodes green with the string ‘Clemens’… (code you know is great:)
Ok, maybe not that interesting analyzer, more interesting is the creation… in the /PrivateAssemblies/Providers folder there are already several analyzers available, actually the ones mentioned above.
A small analyze of this assembly tells us that all the analyzers are using the IProvider interface and the ProviderAttribute [see below]. After some more exploration you will find that the prgroesion.common assembly has a method ‘ProviderDiscovery’ which looks for classes in the provider directory.
so, making a assembly with the code below is a good start:
[Provider(Name = "ClemensAnalyzer")]
public class TestAnalyzer : IProvider
In the void Initialize(IServiceProvider serviceProvider); you have to initialize your provider, register the actions and action handler [action.ActionHandlers.Add(new ActionHandler(this.OnAnalyzeTests));]… which calls your analysis…
foreach (Node node in this._graph.VisibleNodes)
{
if (node.Label.Contains("Clemens"))
{
node[HasClemens] = true;
outputObjects.Add(node);
this.ThrowIfCancelled();
}
}
the node[HasClemens] = true; is some additional meta data you add to your diagram: private static GraphProperty HasClemens = GraphProperty.Register("HasClemens", typeof(bool), new GraphMetadata("Clemens","This one contains Clemens",null,GraphMetadataFlags.Default), typeof(TestAnalyzer));
All this and a bit more [didn’t finished the analysis completely, there is a lot more possible] result in your own analyzer…
Now, let’s start making a useful one :-)
Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Requirements Management Guidance
Another delivery from the VS ALM Rangers is public available… the Requirements Management Guidance.
Very useful guidance, with a small contribution from me with the Enrich VSTA 2010 Use case diagram with SketchFlow Screens post. [see the Requirements Elicitation part].
Traceability in VS2010
Always an interesting question, how does traceability work in VS2010?
To often asked without any context, or only asked from a requirements perspective. Still way too open to answer in a tweet. So, a post to canalize those questions a little bit more…
[see the image below for the numbers]
you can take two directions when talking about traceability. The first is focused on “work”, the work items repository part of TFS [on the left side of the green dotted line]. with work related traceability we can answer questions like “did we completed all tasks for that requirement?” [for more see the red list]. Information which is very important for every roll in the Application Lifecycle. A tester want to know if he can start testing, so he want to see if the developer is ready. A project manager wants to plan the work. Developers want to know if designers are ready to start with a stabile set of needs… and many more. All work related information, and information which can be tracked/ traced by using work item and its repository.
VS2010 main capability for work related traceability are the TFS work item repository [see image below from MSDN] and linking of work items, setting up a hierarchy.
We can breakdown requirements, or user stories, in tasks. 
tasks that needs to be executed to get the requirement done. These tasks can have a parent-child relation [and other see Working with Link Types on MSDN]. Giving us the information we need in any kind of way, for example reports.
So far the work related traceability. The other kind of traceability is based on artifacts, things we make during the application lifecycle, I will call them ALM artifacts. ALM artifacts are used to create the solution/ application. For example the source, XAML and configuration files which make the solution. But, also the diagrams which we created to make a correct, consistent and good communicated application architecture, we use them to drill down from the needs to code. And also test cases belong to the things we make during the application lifecycle [I can imaging when you get confused now, test cases are within VS2010 work item types, but they definitely belong to the artifacts section].
Use case – user story what is the difference… I often use both [see this piece of MSDN documentation for modeling requirements]. User stories are work item types and use cases are ALM artifacts. So, they are a great bridge between the ‘work-world’ and ‘artifact-world’. The good thing is the capability of VS2010 to link diagrams, and other model elements to work items. [How to: Link Work Items to Model Elements], this give us the capability to create a trace.
From the description and diagrams of the requirements, the often called problem domain, we have to make a big jump into the solution domain.
Diagrams are created like the component diagram and layer diagrams visualizing the high level pieces of the solution with the dependency and interfaces between these components and layers. [used this image in this post; the modeling world].
It is also a big gap for traceability, to get this a little bit better a solution can be the replaying of scenarios written down in the user stories and drawn in activities as described in this post; VS2010 Modeling; Create Lifeline from Component.
A trace back from component/layer to requirement can be a link from model element to the user story work items in where he is used. Never did this, it’s a manual process and probably people will forget the links, maybe with some kind of notification this would be valuable…
An interesting VS2010 capability is the connection between the layer diagram and the sources. This makes a trace possible between the high level design and the sources. See image below.
Because test cases are work item types in VS2010 they can be connected to any other ALM artifact, giving us the possibility to connect for example test cases to use case diagrams. Easier to accomplish and to maintain is the connection with test tasks and corresponding user story. But this doesn’t answers questions like; “which code is touched by this test”. VS2010 answers this question with Test Impact, see “Determining Which Builds Have Bug Fixes, New Features, or Requirements”, “Recommending Tests to Run That are Affected by Code Changes” and “Developing Tests from a Model”.
Another interesting traceability scenario can be build with test case generation, see this ‘old’ Model Based Testing beta 1 video. [some more info on MBT can be read on Rob’s blog]
Next, 
all have a work related task. So, not only traceability within the two sections is possible also traceability between the two sections is possible. answering questions like; “which task created this line of code?”… creating this link / trace is a manual task but it can be controlled by a check-in policy.
So, when someone asks you the question; “what about traceability in VS2010?” you now can canalize this and guide him/ her to the real traceability question they want to have answered [and tell the solution]….
< probably more to come on this interesting topic, also because the extensibility model of the diagrams is powerful enough to create your own required traceability between artifacts with notifications and work item linking… very very interesting >
VS2010 Modeling; Create Lifeline from Component
From the VS2010 MSDN sequence diagram documentation…
Relationship to other diagrams
You can use UML sequence diagrams together with other diagrams in several ways.
Lifelines and types
The lifelines you draw in a sequence diagram can represent typical instances of the components or classes in your system. You can create lifelines from types, and types from lifelines, and show the types on UML class diagrams and UML component diagrams. For more information, see Classes and Lifelines.
Beside we can create lifelines from/for classes we also can create lifelines for/from components… which is actually a very interesting feature.
Context menu on a component shows the create lifeline option [not available when clicking on a part ]
After the creation of several lifelines, you can draw the interactions between the components. There isn’t functionality like the bi-directional method creation in the class-sequence diagram interaction for the component-sequence diagram. Kind of logic, a component only has interfaces.
Why would you want to do this, create sequence diagrams for components?
While the component diagram 
is a static view of your system the sequence diagram is dynamic, it visualizes the flow in your application, the sequence of actions that occur in the system. So, you could use sequence diagrams to validate your system, your component design. Take a scenario, a requirement scenario, and create a sequence of actions from in a sequence diagram 
. By doing this you create a kind of simulated behavior of the component structure, which you can check on correctness and consistency.
The scenarios used for this can be found in the use case diagrams 
, which describe the actions that take place on/in the system. Now describes a use case diagram not really a scenario, you better can use an activity diagram for that 
, which can be based on the use case diagram as a kind of use case realization. Now the interesting thing is, testers use activity diagrams to create test cases, they have specific technologies to extract the right amount and type of scenarios [see http://robkuijt.nl/index.php?entry=entry080423-135750 ], these scenarios we can use to validate our component design which actually closes the loop.
It would be even more interesting and powerful if we not only could link sequence and component diagrams but also use case and activity diagrams making notification when an activity changes and a scenario can’t be run anymore on the purposed component… hard to accomplish, but interesting, versioning would be hard…