Monday, July 30, 2012

Combining TFS, Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 and MS Project to manage a software project

There are a lot of benefits in tackling tasks based on priority instead of using task dependencies. After all, priorities change during the duration of a software project and it's difficult to keep tasks ordered sequentially. Getting your employer to buy in to using an Agile methodology to work on tasks based on priority will probably come with trade-offs. In my case the trade-off was that we had to use MS Project as well.


Here are a few things we learned while setting up a process:


1) Use leveling by priority in MS Project to avoid using task dependencies.


2) We had issues mapping priority fields between TFS and MS Project. In the end, we used to fields and had to keep them sync'ed (you can use a Macro for this).


3) The Scrum template in TFS doesn't allow you to log work. You'll need a custom column for this. This column needs to be mapped back to Project.


4) If you want to view a sprint burndown chart, remember to set the start/end date for the sprint.


We still have some unresolved issues:


1) We are not able to view the Release burndown chart.


2) If you are using baselines, you need to update the baseline before capturing hours in a task that doesn't exist in Project. That's because once you complete a tasks, the initial estimate is gone.


Anyways, I'm happy that the project is managed as "Agile" and take advantage of all the goodness of Scrum.

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