To support the release of Beta 1 of Scrum for Team System 3.0 for 2010, this is the first in a series of blog posts that will help you prepare for the release of the template and better plan your adoption strategy.
Scrum for Team System 3.0 (for TFS 2010) brings with it many changes, many of which work together to produce what I believe is our best template yet. Improvements however don't come without a cost, and in 3.0 that cost is some added complexity for the simpler projects.
This post will attempt to sum up the changes, and some of the drivers behind them, whilst the following posts will go into each area in more detail.
So what's changed?
- Brand New QA Model
- Multi-team/multi-cadence support
- Better in template support for release planning
- Better in template support for enforcing done
- Support for Lab and Test Manager features (Camano)
- Calculability of state
- New de-scoping system
As always, our philosophy has been to make it easy to do the right thing, whilst being flexible enough to allow people to get the template working in most environments.
It does need to be stated however that Scrum for Team System is a Scrum template, not a generic project manager template, or even generically Agile. We think this is a strength.
Brand New QA Model
The changes here are so extensive that they really do deserve a series of posts of their own. However suffice to say that we took the plans we had for 2.3 and put them on steroids by implementing them with 2010.
Multi-team/multi-cadence support
SfTS has always been great for single teams, and for small numbers of multiple teams all working to the same cadence. Where the standard solution started to break was with really massive programmes of work. In the past we've worked with some of our larger clients to adapt our own template, but in 3.0 we decided it was time to "bake in" a system that would enable us to describe a far wider variety of team set-ups and build it into the template itself. In that way all our standard reports and queries will work right out of the box, no matter how complex your project.
Better In-Template Release Planning Support
Good release planning is essential to agile project success. Whilst we're also working on some great add-on tools in this area, we thought we should bake some better release planning features into the template as well. They're modest, but very useful.
Enforcing Done
One of the top five Scrum-but failures has to be "not quite getting to Done" at the end of the sprint. We've harnessed the power of TFS 2010 named links and our new and improved Event Service to make this a little easier to enforce.
Support for Lab and Test Manager
Our new QA model fits perfectly with the new Lab and Test Manager features so those "no repro" bugs are accessible inside the process template. We feel we've managed to harness the power of this great new tool, whilst still staying true to the principles of Scrum. Thanks to Euan Garden at Microsoft for his help with this one.
Calculability of State
Previously, one of the great trade offs in Work Item state transitions was "how to guide users" vs "allowing for oops states". In 3.0 we've employed a simple rule that allows us to model the "expected legal transitions" but still allows you to fix mistakes. It's going to allow us (or you) to write tools to validate and correct the entire "state machine" of your Work Items.
New de-scoping System
The old deferral system in 2.x worked, but it was tedious to do, and prone to error as well as misunderstanding. The new way is much cleaner, and focuses around the PBI's rather than the Tasks, where it always should have been.