To create the reports, we will need to have some way of
capturing this data. Traditional agile would suggest having story cards
(standard index cards) posted somewhere in your war room. That and excel
spreadsheets can help you track this.
That does work for many projects, but what about cases where
the team is distributed (including customers)? In that case many people, me
included, prefer to have the user story information captured electronically.
If a company is already using TFS, this tool has many ways you can capture this
information.
This article proposes using the MSF Agile template included
standard in TFS as the basis for your reporting needs. One could customize his
or her own version of this to make it fit agile. We will not cover that in
this article, but you can look at this web
article if you are interested in customizing your own template.
In the MSF Agile template there is a work item called a
Scenario, which can be used to capture your user stories. See Figure 1 for an
example of what this looks like.
Figure 1
On this screen, Rank can be used as iteration number. This
field is free text, so there are no constraints on that. On the Details tab
there is a field called "Rough Order of Magnitude" which can be used
for the point total. This field is constrained and needs to be modified with
the point system you want to use. To modify existing templates or to create
your own, see this article
on MSDN. The title is the User title and the description can include more
details to capture more in depth information or links to documents which the
team can refer to.
Another benefit of using TFS is that each story has a unique
number which can help when identifying which story the team is working on.
With these different fields, which are captured in the TFS database,
TFSWorkItemTracking, management reports can be created. Keep in mind that
this is not the reporting warehouse so the report SQL statements that are
included in this series could change with upgrades. The bottom line is that if
your servers have a regular backup routine, your database for your project
information will be hard to lose, showing another benefit of this method.
