The third part of the series posts about scrum under TFS. This time we will focus on the usage of the Scrum templates. Read our previous parts here:
This article is also cross posted on the Ordina blog.
Use the Scrum templates
Common
Create your Team Site with the correct Template. Once you have chosen a template, you can’t change to another template only make minor changes to the chosen template.
eScrum
Learning eScrum from within TFS is very difficult as there is no guidance. So there is a lot of searching what everything means. For example: product backlog details, area, sprint backlog details.
The best way to learn this product is by using the web interface. Here you can find a context sensitive help for each part which explains you very well what it means.
You can group several product items by using the areas. There can be several areas’ which can contain several products.
A sprint is the same as iteration in TFS and the product backlog details in Scrum is the description in TFS.
Sprint information (Scrum master, start and end date of the sprint, goal,…) can be filled in the Sprint details
When using TFS to add your sprint items you have to connect manually the backlog ID. This is done automatically when using the web interface.
In common we can say that the web interface is more handy and user friendly to use than TFS. Although that the web interface has a few issues. There are times that items disappear in the web interface. But when you restart they’re back. Also it seems that the page refresh after a post back not always work. And in some cases you need a full refresh trigger (F5) before everything will be showed again.
Also viewing some reports seems to give problems, but after you rebuild the data warehouse this is solved.
The biggest disadvantage of eScrum is that not all the Scrum guidelines are followed. Microsoft shouldn’t be Microsoft if they haven’t give it their own interpretation. For example the burn down chart doesn’t give an overview of the complete sprint, but only to the current date. This doesn’t give you a complete overview of the sprint. Also when you want to book more hours than initial planned on a sprint task, eScrum gives sometimes strange results.
CodePlex
Codeplex has the less connection with Scrum. There is no product backlog only the sprint backlog. Making sprint items is equal to making work items. During this phase you also include the item to an iteration. There are 3 reports and the rest are just the standard reports.
Most of the changes are just a rename of the standard VSTS items.
The name Lightweight is well chosen.
Conchango
Using this template gives us a very nice user experience because it’s totally converted to Scrum
When creating product backlog items or sprint items, you have to fill in the manually the sprint number, which is defined separately.
There is no direct connection between the product backlog items and the sprint items, but you can link them through the Links tab. This is the best solution, because you can’t create a hierarchical structure in VSTS 2005.
They have integrated a recycle bin, so if you “delete” (which means status is set to deleted) a Work item, you can recover it from here.
There are a few administration modules available which gives us extra possibilities.
It’s easy to maintain the users through the separate Administration tool “Listmanager”. Through the Administration module “Report installer” you can choose which reports are available per project.
If you want a direct update of for example the burn down charts, you can use the “Warehouse manager” to push a direct update.
So this was the third part. In the next part, we will give a complete overview of all the Scrum templates.
Your TFS Scrummasters
Bart Wullems and Sven Cipido