Scrum for Team System V3.x Beta 2 Released

Conchango has released the second beta of their Team Foundation Server process template for Scrum. This version works with the current beta 2 release of TFS 2010. Click here to download.

New Product Backlog Estimation History Report for Conchango Scrum TFS Template

Paul Gauthier and I were talking about using more of the information stored in the Team System data warehouse for the "inspect and adapt" aspects of most Agile practices. If you use TFS for managing your Product/Sprint Backlogs, associate source control changesets to Sprint Backlog Items, and use Team Build then you have a wealth of information about your process at your fingers. There are some great reports out of the box with the Conchango Scrum for TFS process template, but there is so much more data to be mined.



Paul's team is just starting with Scrum and we have had many conversations about estimating User Stories in the Product Backlog using Story Points. Most of the groups I coach have to get used to the idea of estimating this way. I always tell them that over time your team will become more accurate with gauging the story point value of individual stories. We talked about being able to go back over time and see how many hours were actually worked against individual stories and using that data to get an idea of how much diversity there are in the actual hours worked over multiple stories assigned the same story point value.



Paul created the great report we are calling "Product Backlog Estimation History". You choose a story point value and a date range, then the report will show you a graph of the number of Product Backlog Items with the same amount of actual hours worked.


Over time you can see trends in how accurate your team is estimating using story points by seeing the variation of hours actually worked. If you see a large variation then you might want to look at this during a retrospective to see why the estimates are no more accurate. You will see some degree of variation naturally, but large amounts can be a symptom of a deeper issue.

Reformatted Product Backlog Composition Report for Conchango TFS Template

There are some great reports that come out of the box with the Conchango Scrum process template for TFS, but I have always had an issue with the formatting of the Product Backlog Composition report.

This report is a great breakdown of each Sprint showing the Product Backlog Items and all the associated Sprint Backlog items. It shows the story points assigned to each Product Backlog Item as well as the original estimated hours versus the hours remaining for each of the subsequent Sprint Backlog items. This is a good report for management that want to see what items are being worked on in the Sprint and now muck work remains to be done. Project managers used to more traditional reporting seem to like it also.

I had a few of issues with the report that comes with the template:

• The Story Points for each Product Backlog Item line up on top of the column for the Sprint Backlog Item's original estimated hours. This makes it look like the total of those hours, which of course it isn't.



• There is a total for the hours remaining for the Sprint Backlog Items, but it is at the top of the column next to the Story Points for the Product Backlog Item. This also leads to the misconception that the Story Points are the total for the original estimates. I also would expect the totals to be at the bottom of the columns, not at the top.



• The rows are separated using alternating row colors, but I rarely print the report with colors so the rows run together.

Paul Gauthier, who works at one my clients, created a new version that addresses the issues above. Click here to download the version Paul has reformatted.

Paul is working on a few other reports that I have had in mind for a while but could not find the time to create (plus I do not know very much about SQL Reporting Services). I'll post those soon.

Comfortably Scrum: My Common Product Backlog Work Item Customizations

For the last half of this year I have spent the majority of my time helping various clients adopt Scrum and Agile engineering practices using Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server. After initial Scrum training and an overview of TFS, we will customize the implementation to fit each company's individual needs. I am a big fan for Conchango's TFS process template for Scrum and their work item template for Product Backlog items is the template I extend the most. Here are some of the most common changes and additions I make to this item for my clients.

First I change few of the labels for the standard fields from the Conchango template:

Business Priority is changed to Business Value since the word "priority" has a certain connotation of order. I also implement a SuggestedValues rule with values ranging from 100 to 1000 with increments of 100 (100, 200, 300, etc.).

Estimated Effort (days/story points) is changed to just Story Points since I really encourage teams to not use days or hours when estimating the Product Backlog. I add a SuggestedValues rule to this field with the Agile standard of the Finbonacci sequence variation (1,2,3,5,8,12,20,40,100). Some clients use the planning poker cards from Crisp, but I do not include 0, 1/2, ?, or the Coffee Break card.

I also change the description on the Conditions of Acceptance section to include "or How To Demo Steps" since I really like using this technique over just a bulleted list of acceptance criteria.

I also add two new fields:

Return On Investment which is a read only field calculated by dividing the Business Value by the Story Points. We use this as additional perspective when ordering the Product Backlog. The value is updated by a web service created using Howard van Rooijen's project template for TFS event subscription end points.

Product Backlog Type which is used many different ways depending on your Agile tool or general philosophy. My version has three allowed values:

• User Story which is exactly what it sounds like. All these entries must fit the user story format.
  


• Technical Requirement which is for any behind the scenes work like refactoring, building supporting components with no UI, etc. This helps identify which items require functional tests to be created (meaning a User Story) or those that just need to be regression tested with the current suite of tests.
  



• Epic which is used for placeholder entries. Some people like to use TFS Areas for this but I prefer to put it at the Product Backlog level. It allows stakeholders to throw pie in the sky ideas on the backlog. Our rules specify that an Epic is not estimated, is always last in delivery order, and can never be added to a Sprint until it is broken up into acceptable User Stories with a Story Point value that can be done in half a Sprint.

I also add some new work flow steps:

Ready For Test is something the Conchango template puts at the Sprint Backlog level and I prefer to have this measured at the Product Backlog level. There is some contention on this even on the Conchango forums. My thought is that a task like "Create class to hold search criteria." cannot be tested but its corresponding User Story ("Search Online Catalog") can be.

Failed Test and Passed Test are two optional steps I sometimes put in to follow Ready For Test. This depends on how integrated the testers are with the development team. If they are very integrated and the team is good with simply communicating failed and passed tests verbally or via email then these can be left off. I have had less integrated QA teams that were also not co-located with the team and we found these steps necessary to keep up with test results.

And finally I organize the form a bit to keep it symmetrical and grouped a bit more clearly.

These changes are not necessarily a good fit for every team and I really try to understand the level at which each client can adopt the Scrum processes before we run head first into customization. I have found these changes to bring value to the process for the majority of time.

Comfortably Scrum: Sprint Planning Using Conchango’s Sprint Task Board Application

After my last blog post about the Agile features in the upcoming 2010 release of VSTS and TFS I got to thinking about some comments by Jeff Hunsaker. I had complained about the lack of good Sprint planning features in TFS and Jeff had mentioned using the Sprint Task Board WPF application provided by Conchango to work with their Scrum process template for TFS. I have used this in my Daily Scrums but had not really thought of it as a planning tool. I revisited that idea after Jeff’s comments and I will say it does have some features around this that I had not thought of using before.

When you open the Sprint Task Board you are prompted to choose a project then choose a Sprint. The Sprint you choose is actually an item in the hierarchical list of Iterations. I have always just selected my specific Sprint, but if you choose a Release you will then see all of the Product Backlog items under that release. So if you have previously performed your Release Planning and assigned Product Backlog items to their projected releases then they should show up. The image below is a view of a sample Product Backlog viewed in Excel. Notice that all but one item is assigned to the Release 1 Iteration.

When you open the Task Board application and choose Release 1 for this project you will see all of the items that were associated to Release 1 (or a Sprint in that Release). Anything not assigned to that Release will not be shown.

At this point you could start a Sprint Planning meeting using this interface a add Sprint Backlog Items to each Product Backlog by rights clicking anywhere on the row and choosing Add Sprint Backlog Item. You can fill out the pop up form and a new Sprint Backlog item will be created and linked to the corresponding Product Backlog item. The linking is required for all the various reporting mechanisms in the Conchango Scrum template on TFS.


Most of the time we have used Excel during Sprint Planning meetings since we tend to be adding quite a lot of items and using the query view in Team Explorer was tedious. Using the Task Board app is less tedious than Team Explorer but still not as easy as Excel. So you can still use Excel to rapidly enter Sprint Backlog items and then publish them back to TFS, but since you cannot link items in Excel they will not be connected to any Product Backlog items. You can then open the Task Board app and open the Orphaned Work Item section to drag and drop these Sprint Backlog items to their corresponding Product Backlog item.


So while this option does not provide a good option for Release Planning, it is one possible solution for Sprint Planning. Using the Task Board app can give the team a more tactile feeling during the process. Seeing item represented on the screen gives you more of an idea for the scope of a Sprint/Release.

I still like the interface provided by VersionOne for Release Planning. Not only does it provide an easy to use drag and drop interface, it provides feedback on capacity as you go (see a demo here).


So thanks again to Jeff for prompting me to take another look at the functionality in the Conchango Task Board application. Now if they could just rip off the features in VersionOne I could get down to only two applications!

Comfortably Scrum: Free Scrum Dashboard on CodePlex

Thanks to the guys over at TFS Times I found this cool web application on CodePlex. This is a web based dashboard for the Conchango Scrum Process Template for Team Foundation Server. It provides some basic rollup information about work item states and hours, a sprint burn down chart, and a sprint task board similar to the WPF application version being released by Conchango next month. You can drag and drop items to different states like Conchango's application aslo.

I had a few issues getting it to work but nothing major. It is pretty cool for a free tool. The WPF app from Conchango has more features, but it costs $90 per license so this can be a cheap alternative.

CodePlex has a ton of TFS content and if you use Team Foundation Server at your development shop I highly suggest you check it out.

Conchango Scrum Template 2.2 & Sprint Task Board Updates

Conchango has released the 2.2 version of their Scrum Process Template for Team Foundation Server. This template is free and includes some great additions including a load of new reports, bug fixes from 2.1, and a web based report slide show. They have also provided a command line utility to upgrade your 2.1 template to 2.2. See the full details here.

They released the beta 3 version of their WPF Sprint Task Board application a few weeks ago which now supports the Scrum template 1.2 for TFS 2005 as well as 2.x on TFS 2008. It is going to be release by the end of this month and the pricing will be $90 per license for 10 copies or under. You can get discounts for larger volumes.

Conchango Task Board for Team System Beta Released

The Conchango Task Board for Team System has been been released in Beta. It only works with TFS/VSTS 2008 and the 2.0 version of the Scrum process template. You can download it here.

Conchango's Sprint Task Board

I wanted to thank Crispin for giving me the heads up that Conchango has posted two video demos of their upcoming Sprint Task Board application. As I stated in my last few blog posts, I had been working on something similar but where Conchango has dedicated development resources, I had only a few spare hours here and there between work and handling the new baby. I look forward to the release of this application and will post a review as soon as it is out. I did learn a good deal more about the TFS API while working on my own pet project and I am working on some more in-depth technical posts in the next week or so.