TFS is not all about process, although it does provide work item capability in the form of Process Templates. This article discusses on the Conchango v2 Beta 1 Process Template for Team System 2008. I have personally been using v1 of Conchango’s template for over a year and am anxious to see some improvements. They are there, but there is still a little room for improvement. This is Beta, after all. No worries there.
Scrum Template From Conchango
There is a lot to like in this process template, which is designed and advocated for by Ken Schwaber himself. You can’t ask for a much better advocate for a Scrum template than the person who co-invented the process.
Version 1 (which I have used in production for over a year) is cludgey, though. Some reasons for that were due to capabilities of TFS itself. An example of the awkwardness inherent to the system is the lack of a hierarchical view of work items. This means we can see Product Backlog Items, but have no tree to expand to see their associated Sprint Backlog Items, or Tasks.
Data entry can be cumbersome in this system because of this lack of association between work item types. For instance, when I have marked all Tasks complete for a Backlog Item, I must still go to that Backlog Item and mark it complete. There is no chained association there that causes work items to keep track of themselves.
That said, there are some great improvements to the template. Notably, I like the addition of Impediment as a work item type. That’s a cool idea.
The "New Product Backlog Item" dialog has several new features, all of which make for cleaner and more effective work item management. Click the image below for a nice blowup. My favorite things on this dialog are:
- The Release menu
- Description template for a User Story
- Conditions of Acceptance tab. This a big deal. What is the definition of done?
- Estimate values are expressed more cleanly, although the Light template does this even better (IMO) my constraining you to the Fibernacci sequence up to 13.
- Business priority is cool. I wish we could see this as a constrained 1…n integer, though. Alas, TFS doesn’t give us that very easily. (Think Rosario).
On the "New Product Backlog Item" dialog, there is this menu item, which lets us assign our backlog item to a future sprint or to a "Future" holding bucket (I created that one). This is good stuff because it gives us a nice holding area for future work that is not assigned to a known sprint.
When creating a task, I now must enter my task priority as an integer as shown here:
I’m not sure what happens when you have more than 8 things, but apparently I can add 2 items with the same priority. Boo. Hiss. Unfortunately, without genuine workflow capability, this is also a restriction of the TFS platform at this time. You could write code to manage the event model of TFS and catch this, but again, think Rosario.
Notably absent from this template is the concept of tasks that link to a Sprint Backlog Item. Effectively, they are rolled up such that Sprint Backlog Items represent work at the task level. I am cool with this as it may encourage us to not bog down in details during planning.
Conclusion
I am very excited about this process template. There are a few kinks to work out, but the model for Scrum looks much better than it did in v1. This is a real contender for teams using TFS and Scrum and I hope Conchango follows through with a strong release.