Posts Tagged ‘microsoft team system’

Selecting a Microsoft Team System (TFS) 2010 Scrum Process Template

August 28th, 2010 | By tpenny in News | 2 Comments »

I recently completed a short assignment comparing the options for Team System 2010 Scrum Process templates for a local IT organization in the travel/financial services industry.  The organization is already committed to Scrum using Team System 2008 with the EMC/Conchango Scrum Template for Team System v2 Template.

I researched the options online including reading through Crispin Parker’s excellent blog articles on the subject.

Here is a summary of the criteria used for evaluating the options

  • Organization already using and committed to the Scrum process using TFS Team System 2008 with the Conchango v3 scrum template, so it would be an upgrade of tools
  • Needed to a free template
  • Needed to support the scrum process specifically

The options I found were:

Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 is a very basic tool and is suited to small single team environments or maybe two team environments where the reliance on the tool vs. direct collaboration is quite low.  It would work well where the planning and scrum master roles are straightforward.  I would think it would be a good option for small product development teams that want the benefits of tool for automation of the scrum process but that will mostly be using a ‘whiteboard’ task board or something similar.  Because the organization in question is larger and more sophisticated, this option was not considered further.

Microsoft Team System Scrum Templatesscrum template comparison - click here for pdf version

The other two options, SfTS and MSF Agile are both more powerful templates and would function well in a more complex multi-team environment where the backlog and planning process is more complex.

I completed a brief comparison of the features based on the existing SfTS 2.0 implementation as the baseline and the existing usage of the tool.  In reality, most of the action takes place with the setup of the sprints and then at the product backlog and sprint backlog task level, so I focussed on these areas in detail as the expense of other features which while useful are not heavily used by this organization today.

I also created a simple quadrant chart to show which templates might be applicable given a specific situation.  The parameters I focussed on were size and complexity of the team(s) and the degree to which an organization is generally agile vs. being strictly scrum in methodology.

Scrum Template Quadrant Chart

Scrum Template Quadrant Chart

As I learn more, I will update this post with the latest information.

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