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It’s always been possible to descope work in the Scrum for Team System template. But the method employed in Version 2.2 whilst functional, was quite fiddly, overly manual and not very “Scrummy”. When building 3.0 we took the opportunity to revamp the way in which it worked and better utilise the power of the Event Service (something you can see ...

In Scrum for Team System 2.x Product Backlog Items (PBI’s) lived a simple life. They had an iteration path, an area path and were linked to Sprint Backlog Items (SBI’s). Confusingly, the more common terminology for SBI’s amongst non TFS users is Sprint Backlog Tasks – or SBT’s – which is why we’ve adopted this terminology for our Version 3.0 ...

The new bug model in Scrum for Team System 3.0 might look obvious at first, but it's taken a long while getting to where it is. Before I start delving into how the new bug model works, it's worth taking some time to describe what came before it. Almost by coincidence, each of the three major versions of Scrum for Team System have had a different ...

There has been some small amount of confusion around the Scrum for Team System version numbers, especially with the popularity of the 2010 TFS Beta.   This short post should help clarify things.   Version Latest Release TFS version Next version Expected 1.x 1.2 ...

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 ...

I found more things to do with sandcastle after part 1 and part 2. Here's a trick that made the sandcastle build simpler. The basic problem is that sandcastle must run after all the binaries are built by projects in a solution (so that it can read those binaries), but before the WiX installer is built (so that the sandcastle output ...

It has been a busy time here at Conchango as we've been making plenty of changes to get Scrum for Team System working on Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server and also incorporating changes driven by community feedback and usage of the plugin on our own development projects. We should be ready to release after we ...

Further to my last post on sandcastle in TFS builds, I wanted to update on the complications that have happened in the last week.  Sandcastle docs and Wix installers.Our installer, built in WiX v3, acts as a project inside the solution and builds last, rolling up the output of the other projects into an MSI file. The sandcastle action ran ...

Sandcastle is a tool from Microsoft to generate documentation as help files from the XML comments in your c# (or vb.net) code.The latest version is the September 2007 CTP, announced here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sandcastle/archive/2007/10/02/announcing-september-2007-sandcastle-release.aspxSandcastle has a reputation as being not release quality ...

I won't call it a miracle as I've been using and developing for Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server for over 2 years now, but with the release of the MCTS: Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server exam recently, I figured I should go and do it before Orcas gets released later this year ...