Rosario April 2008 CTP Investigation (Part 2) - Project Management
Continued from http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2008/05/28/rosario-april-2008-ctp-investigation-part-1-create-team-project.aspx.
Agile Process
MSF Agile is now known as VSTS Process for Agile Software Development v1.0 ... the first visible change and a welcome one. For those those who battle(d) with the Reporting Services based reports in TFS and prefer to work in MS Excel when planning and managing projects ... please note that my own hand is raised ... read on, you will be pleasantly surprised. For those who prefer MS Project, read on anyhow, but take note of the CMMI Process heading further down.
We mentioned two artifacts, namely Iteration Backlog and Product Backlog Excel documents in the last post. Let's have a quick peek at these two and determine if there is any value to the project manager and/or technical team lead type stakeholders.
Product Backlog Documentation
The product backlog document is one of the new tracking workbooks included in the VSTS Agile Software Development process template for agile planning, used to perform high-level product planning. The two workbook tabs are:
Product Backlog
What we see is a list of user stories, effort estimations and iterations that address some or all of the user stories. For the scrum hearted, this looks like a neat product backlog list ... which coincidentally matches the workbook name as well ... guess we are on a good track at this stage.
Capacity
The capacity tab gives us the opportunity to define the start and end dates, resource constraints and holidays for the various iterations. What we get, is a calculated capacity report, which at a glance notifies us whether we are exceeding the available capacity. In essence we can plan our product backlogs and balance them across iterations, before selecting publish to Team Foundation Server.
I for one, am already excited!
Iteration Backlog Documentation
The iteration backlog document is the second of the new tracking workbooks included in the VSTS Agile Software Development process template for agile planning, used to perform low-level product planning. Some of the six workbook tabs are:
Iteration Backlog
We see the relevant work item types for the iteration. The workbook uses the Iteration Backlog query, which you would want to update to filter the relevant iteration to limit any unnecessary noise, i.e.
You can now assign tasks, add child tasks to user stories and once again move and balance work load amongst team members.
Capacity Planning
I love visual information and looking at this tab immediately and without much thinking, I can see that "Anna" is over allocated, while the other resources have spare capacity. We can now go back to the iteration backlog and balance the work ... again all this planning and shuffling is done in Excel, potentially offline, before being committed to TFS.
Burndown
Smile, scum'ers ... we now also have a burn down chart.
Velocity Tracking
We can see the team's velocity ... both actual and required. In this case current > required, which is typically the other way ... unfortunately.
Backlog Pivot Table
If you have not had enough, use the pivot table to do further analysis and planning:
Another workbook lurking around is the issues workbook. Currently it shows no issues ... again not a realistic project, but what is important is that we can synch this workbook with TFS and work offline.
CMMI Process
The process template for CMMI is still called "MSF for CMMI Process Improvement - Rosario" in this release and we hope that the reference to MSF will drop off silently.
I am a scrum / agile person and environments such as RUP and CMMI makes me jittery ... I will therefore not delve into the CMMI environment any further.
Other interesting snippets ...
Not really CMMI specific, but worth pointing out ... take a look at the Query Results:
... anything special? Not? Sure? Look again and note the hierarchical structure. If you look at task 108 ... which is the first after 107 ... sorry, cut off, you specify the parent as being 107 to create the hierarchical relationship (see Parents and Children below):
Opening the same query in MS Project gives us another view of the same data, this time in Oliver's favourite view:
Conclusion
It should be evident that teams can manage iterations, review historical progress and plan current and future iterations. Feedback is given via charts, which give visual feedback to the team, both online and offline ... using familiar tools, i.e. MS Excel, MS Project and Team System Web Access. Round-trip'ing of data between the MS tools and TFS is seamless, allowing each stakeholder to use the tool of choice for the planning and management.
My personal rating for the team management improvements in Rosario at this stage is: 
/ 5 smiles.
Next
... part 3 will look at Architecture.