In managing projects, I have come to utilize Agile Project Management methods to effectively manage software projects. When I say manage software projects, my definition of managing is to lead. No command and control management style enterprise drone. No, I prefer leading by example, and Agile is a great fit for that style.

These Agile techniques have increased the productivity and quality of the groups I have led tremendously. For the agile projects, I have created the custom reports described in this article and others to help lead the projects.

In a previous article, I described creating these reports in Crystal Reports. There is an introduction to using Agile in that article.  Please refer to that for more understanding of actual techniques used. 

For this article and subsequent articles, we assume the reports will be used with an XP/Scrum style methodology. For a more detailed explanation of this, please see this link to view that for a background. That link goes over the basics of how the agile process can work. This included some basics of how the agile project might work. Also, the article went over how to utilize standard Team Foundation Server process templates with your agile process, to help produce reports to help manage your projects. That article was utilized TFS 2005, while this article is based on TFS 2008

In this two part series we will create 3 reports. In this, the 1st part, we create 2 reports: A "Story Details" report to allow you to print out your stories to post up in your team room and a "Current Iteration" report to give a real time status of your current iteration, and a breakdown report.  You can download these reports here.