Welcome to the Application Aspect TeamDef application!

TeamDef was created to satisfy our desire to effectively track working hours consumption on our development projects. During the past few years, before we started to use Team Foundation Server, we got by with Excel time sheets, week plans in Word tables, and at one time we actually wrote our own internal time tracking application. And then came TFS with really great functionalities out-of-the-box. We realized that our development process is very similar to the Agile methodology and we were very excited about that. After a while, however, we realized that we still do not have answers to the questions that were of interest to us. So we decided to write an application that extends Team Foundation Server with time-tracking capabilities – TeamDef was born.

Developing TeamDef was a very tedious process – Microsoft provided a really great API to work with TFS, but, on the other hand, some design patterns did not meet our needs: inability to assign more than one resource to a particular work item, links between tasks were not working as expected in order to create real parent-child relations between work items and so on. Since we did not want to change the Agile process template in order for users to use TeamDef application, we cut back some interesting features from v1.0.

While on one hand we heard many stories how time tracking does not matter, that it is an overhead for developers, and so forth, we still wanted answers to the following critical questions:

·         Are we losing money on some project or client?

·         What can be done more efficiently to make our projects more smoothly?

·         What is the ratio of billable hours versus total hours on a particular project?

·         How can we achieve a continuous improvement of future estimates?

·         When will we have time and resources to do our next project?

·         Do we have enough resources to finish all contracted projects on schedule?

·         And so on…

Here, in front of you, is TeamDef – it provided us with answers to the above questions. We hope that you will be satisfied with it and we hope that you will find it useful in your development process.