Playing around with the Process Template "Team Foundation Server Scrum v1.0 Beta"

Although I was quite interested in trying this template, I did not expect a huge difference with the default "MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0" at first. However I was quite pleased by the little details I came across.

Here are the seven new WorkItems templates : Bug, Impediment, Product Backlog Item, Shared Steps, Sprint, Task, Test Case :

• Bug:

• Impediment:

• Product Backlog Item:

• Shared Steps:

• Sprint (showing the 2 tabs Details and Retrospective):

• Task (along with its TFS Web version):

• Test Case:

Unfortunately, I did not try the Reports, since I have neither Sharepoint nor Reporting Services/BI on my test computer. According to what I saw on the Net, they sound great.

As for us, we just use EXCEL connected to TFS to perform automatically basic subtractions, so we can draw a line every day on the A2 sheet of paper stuck on the wall.

I particularly like the Rich Text Editor support (not only in the History part), but also in the Description part. However, the drawback of this nice advantage is that is it obviously not compatible anymore with EXCEL. Since, our Product Owner and few other people essentially work with EXCEL in sync with TFS, this could be a problem.

As I said, I was just playing around with this template: to really evaluate it, I shoud be using this template in our production project, with real projects constraints.

As a conclusion, now that I am back to work using the "MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0" template, and knowing the advantages of the Scrum version, I just can't wait it release.

However, since it is in Beta version, and like any projects, ours is critical and due to deliver soon, I prefer sticking with the MSF Agile that works fin for us 
(I just added 2 fields and removed 1 field to suite our needs so far).


More info on Scrum methodology and how to use this template in the following video : Channel9 Walkthrough.

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