A work item is a database record which Visual Studio Team Foundation uses to track the assignment and state of work. The MSF for Agile Software Development process defines five work items to assign and track work. These five work items are the scenario, quality of service requirement, task, bug, and risk.
Project health charts aggregate metrics from work items, source control, test results, and builds. They answer questions about the actual state of your project at many scales: for the days within an iteration, iterations within a project, or projects with in a program. The questions are also relevant for many kinds of work items such as scenarios, quality of service requirements, tasks, and bugs.
Velocity
How quickly is the team completing work? Velocity is one of the key elements for estimation. It shows how quickly the team is actually completing planned work, and how much the rate varies from day-to-day, or iteration-to-iteration. Use this data to plan the next iteration, in conjunction with the quality measures. Similar to the remaining work chart, this is most useful when looking at days within an iteration or iterations within a project.
Bugs by Priority
Are the correct bugs being found and triaged? Bugs reported by priority assess the effectiveness of two things: bug hunting and triage. Discovering bugs is a normal part of product development. Often however, the easy-to-find bugs aren’t the ones that will annoy customers the most. If the high-priority bugs are not being found and a disproportionate number of low-priority bugs are, redirect the testing efforts to look for the bugs that matter. In triage, it is easy to over-prioritize bugs beyond the capacity to resolve them, or under-prioritize them to the point where customers are highly dissatisfied.
Bug Rates
How effectively are bugs being found, fixed, and closed? Bug rates are best interpreted relative to all of the current team project activities and the other metrics on the Quality Indicators graph. For example, a high find-rate may be a sign of poorly written code, newly integrated code, or effective testing, or exceptional events such as a bug bash. On the other hand, a low find rate may mean high quality product or ineffective testing. Use code coverage, code churn, and test rates to help you assess the meaning.
MSF for Agile Software Development provides a set of work item queries designed to support the activities and roles in the process.
Project Checklist
The project checklist is the list of tasks that need to be accomplished before a project or iteration starts.
Quality of Service Requirement List
Vision Statement
Iteration Plan
Storyboard
