Test plan field is empty in TFS test plan progress

I spend a lot of my time nowadays helping clients successfully adopt Team Foundation Server. From planning, installation and configuration to customization, builds, release management and everything in between. And, even though, I've been working with TFS for a long time, once in a while you come across something that you have seen before. When that happens, I do my best to share my experience on this blog. So, here is my latest discovery.

The client is running a fresh install of TFS 2013 Update 4. Everything is well, except for one minor annoyance. For some reason, Test Plan field is empty in the Test Plan Progress report. There are no errors in warehouse of analysis cube processing. In fact, there are no errors in TFS, Reporting Services or Analysis Services. Every log is clean and everything runs smoothly. Typically, when you see something does not work or look properly you'd expect an error or at least a warning to show up somewhere, right? Not this time. I've looked around the web, but could not find any reasonable explanation why this is happening. I've found a few entries with people experiencing similar issue, but none provided a solution to this.

Luckily, as a Microsoft MVP in Visual Studio ALM, I have "direct" access to the product team. So, I've reached out and after a few emails back and forth, we've found a solution. It looks like that this issue can occur on fresh installs of TFS. Apparently, the Test Plan dimension loses the friendly names for some attributes when the warehouse/cubes gets processed before a project gets created. This issue can be easily fixed, if you rebuild the warehouse/cube using TFS Admin console. Clicking the Rebuild button in TFS Admin console will put everything back in its place. It's that easy. J