Quick tips for using Team System Work Item Tracking for scrum process

I’ve already posted a bunch of posts on how I use and have used TFS as a support in our scrum projects. Elegant Code have now published an interesting presentation with some hands-on advice and comparisons. You can find the presentation here. Observe that the presentation is not for beginners. You need to understand the basics behind work item tracking and is in the mode of already using TFS but thinking about which work item template and which tools are appropriate.

A note to the presentation, though. Escrum won’t be updated in the future so even if you were considering transition to that template, you should probably rethink your decision. Myself, I’m using Conchango’s Scrum For Team system and EPIServer Scrum Dashboard.

Here more about the future of escrum by bharry.

TFS 2010 for us product owners

I’m currently using a lot of Microsoft Project to keep my distributed stakeholders updated since the scrum dashboard just works for the current sprint and the 2008 web access isn’t very… accessible.  The stakeholders can’t get the overview they need. So, I spend time on separate Microsoft Project files with the long term plans (as described in a previous post) and I keep the product backlog in TFS.

So, I was just thrilled by the images on BHarry’s blog, describing the new features for us non programmers. Finally, I can really invite my stakeholders to keep themselves updated on the level they need.

The dashboard looks awesome! Here are two examples:

For me as a product owner, I of course long for the hierarchical work items:

If I still want to show Gantt charts, I can (if all goes well) use the upgraded Project Integration, since it conserves the hierarchy. This is the main reason I don’t use the integration today.

I’m also very curious about the Sprint planning functions

So, what more can I say: JUST BRING IT ON!

Enterprise scrummish and some don’t try this at home with EPIServer’s scrum dashboard

Current work

I’m currently involved as an administrative resource (you could say something of a scrum master even if we don’t use scrum for this project) in a very short project which has many resources. The resources are divided into multiple teams with shared resources and many dependencies between the tasks of the different teams.

We decided on using Team Foundation Server with the Conchango Scrum For Team System Work item template and EPIServer’s Scrum Dashboard. We are as I mentioned not using scrum but are moving in that direction and by slowly introducing some of the artefacts and tools, I hope to build an understanding for what we want to accomplish. Most of the guys had never used the dashboard before but they loved it. We sit in an open space but with this big a crew, it is hard to get a picture of how things are going for the other teams. Hence, the dashboard and scrums of scrum.

It is really interesting to see how these simple tools work in an enterprise environment. Having only handled one scrum team at the time, this is almost amazing to watch. I can’t wait introducing scrum to these guys and girls.

Think about this if you’re using the EPIServer Scrum Dashboard

But, back to the subject. Since people are new to the tool and I want them to see WHY we’re using the tool, I’ve taken upon myself to fill the product backlog and help out creating the first tasks on the sprint backlog. With so many teams, you can imagine that this takes some time. And since I’m not familiar with all the terms and systems, I can hardly guess what they mean.

So, what I did was that I used the team explorer to create a product backlog item. Then I created related sprint backlog items by right clicking the product backlog item and selecting Create Linked–>Sprint backlog item. Then if the next product backlog item shared many attributes, I right clicked the first product backlog item and selected Create Copy–>Product Backlog item.

Let me put it mildly: don’t do that. What happens is that Create Copy also creates a link and when I then opened the Scrum Dashboard the sprint backlog items of the first product backlog item was instead drawn on the latter product backlog item.

So, instead I created all the product backlog items using Copy from, and then I added the sprint backlog items. I guess the same problem occurs if you do the same with work items of the work item type Bug.