MSF for Agile Software Development Visual Studio 2005 Team System logo

Cycles


About Cycles
Check In
Daily Build
Accepted Build
Iteration
Project
As Needed

Step-by-step

Work Items

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.

Work Products Examples and Templates

Work products are files, documents, specifications, binaries, parts, and other tangible items that are necessary to complete activities and build the product. Many times the creation of one work product is dependent on the completion of another work product.

Quality of Service Requirement List

Scenario List

Persona

Scenario Description

Logical Datacenter Diagram

System Diagram

Test Result

Report Examples

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.

Remaining Work

How much work is left to be done, and when will it be completed? This cumulative flow diagram shows work remaining measured as scenarios and quality of service requirements being resolved and closed in the iteration.

Actual Quality versus Planned Velocity

How many scenarios can be completed before quality is unacceptable? As much as teams believe the saying "haste makes waste" there is usually a business incentive to go faster. A project manager’s goal ought to be to balance the two by finding the maximum rate of progress that does not make quality suffer. This graph presents the relationship, for each iteration, of estimated size to overall quality.

Reactivations

How many work items are being reactivated? Reactivations are work items that have been resolved or closed prematurely. A low rate of work item reactivations (for example, less than 5%) might be acceptable, but a high or rising rate of reactivation should warn the project manger to diagnose the root cause and fix it.

Technical How To's

How To's present information on how to accomplish tasks related to activites and workstreams

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