Hands-On Lab

Agile Project Management in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012

Lab version:11.0.60315.01 Update 2

Last updated:4/9/2013

Contents

Overview

Exercise 1: Product Backlog and Sprints

Exercise 2: Task board

Overview

In this lab, you’ll learn how Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 can help you quickly plan, manage, and track work across your entire team. You’ll explore the new product backlog, sprint backlog, and taskboards which can be used to track the flow of work during the course of an iteration.

Prerequisites

In order to complete this lab you will need the Visual Studio 2012 virtual machine provided by Microsoft. For more information on acquiring and using this virtual machine, please see this blog post.

About the Fabrikam Fiber Scenario

This set of hands-on-labs uses a fictional company, Fabrikam Fiber, as a backdrop to the scenarios you are learning about. Fabrikam Fiber provides cable television and related services to the United States. They are growing rapidly and have embraced Windows Azure to scale their customer-facing web site directly to end-users to allow them to self-service tickets and track technicians. They also use an on-premises ASP.NET MVC application for their customer service representatives to administer customer orders.

In this set of hands-on labs, you will take part in a number of scenarios that involve the development and testing team at Fabrikam Fiber. The team, which consists of 8-10 people, has decided to use Visual Studio application lifecycle management tools to manage their source code, run their builds, test their web sites, and plan and track the project.

Lab Updates

For Update 1, the following changes were made to this lab:

  • Added introduction to Kanban in Exercise 1

For Update 2, the following changes were made to this lab:

  • Updated select steps on use of Kanban to match new capabilities and UI
  • Added introduction to work item tagging to Exercise 1

Exercises

This hands-on lab includes the following exercises:

  1. Product Backlog and Sprints
  2. Taskboard

Estimated time to complete this lab: 60 minutes.

Exercise 1: Product Backlog and Sprints

In this exercise, you will learn how to use Team Foundation Server 2012 to manage your product backlog, create work items, break work items into tasks, and assign tasks to team members. The new backlog features enable you to easily do all of this work while keeping an eye on team capacity.

Note: The team project used in this lab uses a Scrum process template, but the core features demonstrated apply to all process templates.

  1. Log in as Julia. All user passwords are P2ssw0rd.
  2. Launch Internet Explorer from the taskbar and select the TFS FF Web Access button from the favorites bar at the top.

Figure 1

Launching the team web access site

Note: There is also a Web Access link in the Team Explorer window within Visual Studio.

  1. The Home view for the FabrikamFiber Web team provides a high-level overview of the current iteration (Sprint 3) including team workload versus capacity, burndown of tasks over time, and team favorites, which can include a configurable assortment of work item queries, build definitions, and version control paths.In addition, there are links to quickly create new work items and bugs, load the backlog, task board, initiate requests for feedback, and so on.

Figure 2

FabrikamFiber Web team home view

Note: Team favorites can be added or removed from within the team web access portal. For example, navigate to the Build tab to assign build definitions as a team favorite. In addition, team favorite work item queries can be modified from within Visual Studio.

  1. As you can see under the Members section, there are several members listed in this team. Teams are a new concept introduced in Team Foundation Server 2012 to make it easier to manage, assign, and track work. This team is responsible for handling all of the engineering work associated with Fabrikam Fiber’s web presence.
  2. Select the team drop-down box in the top-right corner of the portal and note that there are a few teamslisted. Press the Escape key to keep the current team selected.

Figure 3

Team selection

Note: Each team can have different team favorites listed, different work capacity, and even different work items. The determining factor on where a work item will show up is governed by the Area field.

  1. Navigate to the backlog by selecting the View backlog link under the Activities section.

Figure 4

Navigating to the backlog

  1. The product backlog contains work items that have not been assigned and committed to an iteration. These product backlog items represent user stories that will eventually be broken down into smaller tasks for the team to take on.

Figure 5

Product backlog view

Note: The Current iteration shown in the tree on the left side of this screen is Sprint 3. Team Foundation Server uses the current date and time to determine the current iteration. The virtual machine you are using has been hard-coded to use a date of May16, 2012 for purposes of this lab. This date is set each time you boot up this virtual machine.

If your virtual machine has been running for a while, it may no longer be set to May16, 2012. If so, you should manually set the date on your virtual machine to 10a.m. on May16, 2012. However, if you have modified work items or source control in Team Foundation Server prior to starting this hands-on-lab, it is recommended that you restore this virtual machine to its original state prior to completing this lab.

  1. Imagine that the VP of Fabrikam Fiber has requested that a new user story be implemented for the customer-facing service portal. This new user story will enabled customers to see weather-related service outages. This user story is being designated as high-priority because many customers requested it and customer service indicated that it would greatly reduce phone support during outages. In the Contents section for the Product Backlog, select the last row and then create a new Product Backlog Item with thetitle “Customer should see weather-related outages on portal.”

Figure 6

Adding a new user story to the product backlog

Note: New work items are generally inserted above the selected location. The exception is that if you select the last work item, the insertion will be after the selected location.

  1. Select the Add button to add the new user story to the backlog.

Figure 7

Adding a new user story to the product backlog

  1. Work items on the product backlog are ordered based on priority, with high priority items at the top. Our new work item has a high priority, so move it to the top of the list by dragging and dropping it into place.

Figure 8

Increasing the priority of the new user story

  1. Let’s edit the new user story to assign it to the appropriate product owner and record an initial estimate of expected effort. Double-click on the new user story.

Figure 9

Editing the new user story

  1. Assign the new item to Brian Keller (the product owner for the Fabrikam Fiber Team), set the state to Approved, and set an initial effort of ‘8’. Don’t close the new user story yet.

Figure 10

Assigning the new user story and estimating effort

Note: Each team may choose to define the Effort value as they see fit, using a unit of story points, hours, days, or number of sodas required. The point here is that this measure is a relative value with respect to other work items. Work will be broken down into hours later.

Note: A popular planning approach that helps to eliminate groupthink and considers input from all team members is known as planning poker. You can read more about it at

  1. Add a new tag to the user story by selecting the Add… button just to the right of the Tags label.

Note: Work item tagging is a new feature that is available with Team Foundation Server Update 2.

Figure 11

Adding a tag

  1. Tagging is a very versatile mechanic that can be used by teams for many different purposes, such as tagging bugs to assist with triage or flagging work items for follow-up outside of the normal development and testing scope. Given that the Fabrikam Fiber website is an agile project, imagine that the team would like to tag user stories that deliver positive improvement to the service so that it is easier to round up and communicate those improvements via the company blog after it ships. Type “highlight” for the tag name and then select the Save and Close button.

Figure 12

Adding a tag

  1. To finish the introduction to work item tagging, let’s add in an additional column for tags to the product backlog view. Select the Column Options button.

Figure 13

Adding in the Tags column

  1. Add the Tags column from the Available Columns list to the Selected Columns list.

Figure 14

Adding in the Tags column

  1. Select the OK button to save the selected columns.

Figure 15

Adding in the Tags column

Figure 16

Product backlog showing Tags column

  1. It is also possible to filter the product backlog by tags. Select the Filter button on the right-hand side.

Figure 17

Location of Filter button

  1. Select the “highlight” tag to view the filtered product backlog.

Figure 18

Location of tags

Figure 19

Product backlog view showing tagged work items

  1. Select the Filter button once again to return to the unfiltered product backlog view.
  2. Assign the new user story to the current iteration, Sprint 3, by dragging and dropping it as shown below.

Figure 20

Assigning the new user story to the current iteration

Note: If you are a Scrum purist, you are probably cringing at the fact that we just added new work to a mid-flight iteration. While this is something you might never do in the real world, this is a shortcut taken for purposes of this lab in order to simplify the workflow and still show you all of the aspects of the new project management interface. Well, that, and the VP told you to.

  1. Look at the Iteration Path for the new user story to make sure that it is assigned to Sprint 3 as expected. This user story will remain on the product backlog until the team commits to taking it on.

Figure 21

Assigning the new user story to the current iteration

  1. The product backlog view also provides a velocity chart that shows the amount of work that the team has undertaken in each sprint, with the current sprint breaking that down further to differentiate between work in progress and work completed. Click on the mini chart in the upper-right corner to load the larger view.

Figure 22

Location of velocity chart

  1. During Sprint 1, the team completed 35 story points worth of effort. Sprint 2 was slightly more productive with 42 story points completed. The current iteration represented by Sprint 3 shows that we have completed 18 story points so far, with 23 remaining. Remember that these story points are a relative measure of effort that was agreed upon by the team.

Figure 23

Velocity chart showing progress towards completing user stories

  1. Press the Escape key to close the velocity chart.
  2. The Product Backlog also includes a simple forecasting tool that you can turn on to get a rough idea of what can be accomplished in future iterations. Select the forecast link to turn it on.

Figure 24

Toggling the forecast tool to “on”

  1. Note that the forecasting is currently being calculated with a velocity of 10, meaning that each future iteration will take on about 10 story points worth of effort. As you can see, Sprint 4 is actually forecasted to include 11 story points. Backlog items that do not have Effort assigned are assumed to be 0, so it is recommended that this value is set before using the forecast tool.

Figure 25

Result of forecasting with a velocity of 10

Note: The user story that we just added and assigned to Sprint 3 is the top backlog item listed, and it is NOT part of Sprint 4 even though it may initially look like that. Sprint 4 has a line under it and includes rows two and three.

  1. As we saw from the velocity chart, that may not be aggressive enough for this all-star team, so click on the “10” value to change it to 35 and then press Enter.

Figure 26

Changing the forecasting velocity value

  1. Now that we have the forecasting velocity set to a more realistic value, we can get an idea what the team can accomplish over the remaining iterations.

Figure 27

Changing the forecasting velocity value

  1. The product backlog view also groups the past, current, and future iterations by their assigned dates. Select the Sprint 3 link so that we can break down work and assign it to the appropriate team members.

Figure 28

Navigating to the current backlog

  1. In the backlog for Sprint 3, collapse the two user stories that have a state of ‘Done’ by clicking on the small triangles just to the left of the associated Titles.

Figure 29

Collapsing completed user stories

  1. Before we break down the new user story, let’s take a quick tour of this iteration backlog view. To start with, it shows all user stories and associated tasks that are assigned to the selected iteration, regardless of state.

Figure 30

Current iteration backlog view

  1. At a glance, you can see that the current iteration runs from May7 to 18, with three work days remaining. Just to the right of the current iteration date range, there is a small graph showing the burn down of the remaining work.

Figure 31

Burn down graph

  1. Click on the burn down graph to view it. The graph shows remaining work over the course of the sprint. The actual trend line makes it look like the team may not be able to finish the assigned work in time, but keep in mind that we still expect some work to be completed before the end of the current day (none has been recorded so far).

Figure 32

Enlarged burn down graph

  1. Press the Escape key to close the burn down graph.
  2. Locate the overall Work bar that shows how close to capacity we are for the current iteration based on the total of the Remaining Work for the tasks in this iteration and based on the total capacity for the team. It looks like we are okay now, but we still haven’t broken the new user story into tasks for the team yet.

Figure 33

Overall remaining work with respect to team capacity

  1. Select the Capacity tab to look at the team capacity details.

Figure 34

Location of Capacity link

  1. The capacity view allows us to specify the number of hours per day that each team member will be working on this project, as well as days off per team member, and overall team days off. These capacity settings apply to the current iteration. You can optionally use the activity column to describe the disciplines that each team member specializes in. When tasks are broken down by activity as well, it can provide you with another view across your team’s capacity to determine if, for example, you have enough people working on documentation to meet the demands for this iteration. For now, leave the capacity settings unmodified.

Figure 35

Team capacity settings

  1. Return to the Contents view of the current product backlog.

Figure 36

Location of Contents tab

  1. Before we move on and commit to the new user story that we just added, let’s take a look at a new Update 1 feature – Kanban support. Kanbanis a process improvement tool that can be used in an incremental fashion regardless of the current software development methodology that you are using. It assists with the throttling and tracking of work and illustrates the delivery of value over time to the project stakeholders. Return to the Product Backlog view.

Figure 37

Navigating to Product Backlog

  1. Kanban support adds a new graph to the Product Backlog view called the Cumulative Flow Diagram. Click on the diagram to open it.

Figure 38

Cumulative Flow Diagram location

  1. The Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) shows the amount of work is various states over time. The horizontal axis shows lead time and the vertical axis shows work in progress.