I went to my favorite session of Tech Ed today, but it was for personal gratification reasons that I enjoyed this so much. I am so happy about the work coming out of Conchango that I could pop. Why? Because when I get home I have the task of implementing TFS 2008 for my organization using the Scrum process template. I was nervous about this because of the tremendous amount of customizations I have been making to the Scrum work items in the prior version of the template I had been working with.
Colin Bird, CTO for Conchango, showed the 2.1 version of the process template today. It solved almost 100% of the problems I had been struggling with in my customized versions of the template.
- Support for different teams on every work item type. This is HUGE because it allows for all teams to pull work from a single backlog.
- Burn down reports for sprint, product, and release, that all split against teams. This is the biggy. If you haven’t tried working with reporting in TFS, you don’t know how HUGE this is. Awesome.
- Code churn reporting
- Value flow diagrams
- Elimination of the Sprint data element in a work item in favor of using a release model based on iterations. Thank you.
- Bugs as work items that appear on the product backlog
Honestly, there is very little left to do! I can only think if a few things I will be adding to this already existing functionality.
- Epics and Themes as work items and reports to support them. Even this will get better in Rosario with hierarchical work items.
- Tagging
That’s about it.
Colin also showed us an awesome new product that Conchango will be charging for and I would happily pay for. It is a WPF application that is a Scrum board working right off of TFS directly. There are other attempts at solving this same problem in the open source world, but this one is fully baked and soon to be available. It looks very usable. I can’t wait to see this thing in my shop. It will help the daily standup so much, and the overhead of making out physical cards will be a thing of the past.
I took a picture of it with my cell phone, but I don’t think I was supposed to do that. Oh, what the hell. Here it is.
You can actually drag the cards around and they change state and work remaining. If Colin weren’t English I would have hugged him. And then tickled him.
That electronic scrum board is going to be very useful for distributed teams; a physical board provides a much more digestible view than any of the current list-based electronic interfaces to TFS. Any word on the price range?
Not yet, and I still secretly love it.
A beta version of Conchango’s task board (Task Board for Team System) is now available for download.
Checkout: http://scrumforteamsystem.com/en/TaskBoardBeta/Default.aspx for more details.
Crispin Parker,
Conchango.
Take a look on our tool ScrumDesk (http://www.scrumdesk.com).
We implemented task board view which becomes most useful during stand-up meetings. It provides a view on your stories in different ways (not only task board, but also grid view, treemaps,…).
If you are searching for a way to not maintain your data redundantly in TFS and other project management tool, then ScrumDesk can be solution. It supports synchronization with TFS too. Save is not required, your data are automatically synchronized and all team members are notified about this change.
Tags and Themes are supported too.
ScrumDesk is free for up to 5 users.