My MSDN Magazine article on Agile Planning with VSTS 2010

My first MSDN magazine article is now live. In this article I cover the product backlog and iteration backlog spreadsheet in VSTS 2010 and how these can be used in planning agile projects. Here is the link to the article: Agile Planning Tools In Visual Studio Team System 2010

Happy Reading!

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 22, 2008
  PingBack from http://wp1.6log.pl/?p=290

• Anonymous
  January 05, 2009
  Ajoy, It has been long time. I just happened to visit your blog and read your article. Very useful.

• Anonymous
  January 20, 2009
  Thank you Sriram.

• Anonymous
  February 17, 2009
  I read your article on Agile Planning with VSTS 2010 in MSDN Mag. Provides good preview of VSTS 2010 Agile project management capabilities. Thanks

• Anonymous
  April 01, 2009
  Hi, just read the article, very interesting indeed.I have one question/comment though, has MS considered the daily work related to agile development?In our case this means support for daily stand up meetings.The units which are doing distributed development have a great need for online VSTS task board.We have piloted EMC, COnslutings (prev. Conchango)TaskBoard for Team system and teams saw it as useful tool...But it has some disadvantages:it  adds extra cost to our VSTS Total cost because it costs some extra on top of VSTS.it is not as feature rich as pure agile WIT tools (e.g. VersionOne) It would be interesting to know have you thought about extending VSTS2010 scope to this area?Br,HannuT

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2009
  I noticed in the article that the sample provided measures velocity in hours. The generally accepted view of velocity is work completed/hours. Hours alone does not mean anything (somebody could work 40 hours on a product and not contribute any work - their velocity is 0). As you mention earlier in your article people use different ways to size work - story points, etc. Are you going to reflect this with defining a unit of size in a work item? Rough order of magnitude would seem to map well if it could allow higher ranges.

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2009
  Hi HannuT,I am not aware of any plans to add a task board in VSTS 2010. I will forward your comment to the product team though.Another tool that I am aware of is:GreenHopper TFS Planning Board (http://greenpeppersoftware.com/en/products/greenhopper-tfs/features/)Thanks for your comments,

• Anonymous
  April 06, 2009
  tornrhan - regarding the Task Board, I can say that we're definitely considering something along these lines for future releases.  VSTS 2010 won't contain this functionality, but we're actively considering how we can REALLY support agile teams in VSTS 2010 and future releases.  It's a definite priority.

• Anonymous
  April 13, 2009
  Thanks Ajoy! Great article and look to the future! Rod