Tracking Your Project Progress In Visual Studio Online

Introduction

This article will help you chart the work that is going on in your project, using Visual Studio Online. Visual Studio Online offers several useful ways to track the progress in our projects, including burndown and cumulative flow diagrams, boards or work item queries.

Note:

Make sure that you have created your project on your Visual Studio Online account. Follow my previous articles before getting on to this demo.

Links:

• Click here to create a free Microsoft account (Outlook/Hotmail).
• Click here to learn how to create a Visual Studio Online account and creating a new team project with TFVC added with inviting the members to work on it.
• Creating a team project with Git
• Connected IDE Experience in Visual Studio Online
• Customize your Visual Studio Online Project
• Work with Sprints at your Visual Studio Online Team Project

Developer Requirements

• Microsoft account
• Internet connectivity
• Web browser
• Visual Studio Online account
• A project that should be created on your Visual Studio Online

Follow the below steps now to work with tracking the progress on your Visual Studio Online project.

Step 1: Open your Visual Studio Online Project first and create a new query by navigating to WORK – Queries – New – New query.

Note: We are going to create a chart for tracking the status of our product backlog. Work item charts are based on the flat list queries. Since the available product backlog query is a hierarchical one, we are going to create a new flat one.



Step 2: Leave the flat list of work items option selected. Configure the filters to return product backlog items, and save the query giving it a name.



Step 3: Now, navigate to the charting section by clicking on Charts. Then, click on New chart.


Step 4: Select the type of chart (Pie) and the grouping (state). Click on OK .

Note: Pie, bar, and column charts let us get a count of work items grouped by a single field.



Step 5: Now, it shows the newly created chart.

Note: The chart will get updated as the underlying query returns different results.

Step 6: Now, create another new chart provided. This time, choose a Stacked bar chart. State for the rows and Assigned to for the columns. Click on OK followed by it.



Step 7: Show the newly created chart.

Note: Stacked bar and pivot table charts allow us to track progress against two different field values. In this case, we can see how many product backlog items are there in each state, and how many of them are assigned to each team member.


Follow my next article where we will be working with a Kanban board for managing the work in Visual Studio Online.