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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 October 2009 I created 2 codeplex projects which I would to tell you about: SQL Server Reporting Services MSBuild Tasks (ssrsmsbuildtasks) A few years ago I created some tasks for MSBuild to help deploy reports for my project, details can be found here,  since then my tasks have been re-used in a few other projects within my ...

Within any application lifetime management methodology, the reports are a useful tool to help see how well , or not , the project is progressing.  Within the Scrum methodology the reports which are used for tracking progress are the burndown reports.  In the Scrum for Team Systems process templates for Team Foundation Server these ...

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 ...

Next week I’m speaking on Scrum in the Enterprise and Process Customisation with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles. There is far more to Scrum for Team System Version 3.0 than I can possibly cover in the allotted time so I’m supporting both the presentation as well as our Beta 2 launch with a series of blog posts. To make ...

I'll be at Agile 2009 next week where I'm presenting two papers: On Monday the 24th of August at 4pm it's "Why (so many) Testers  (still) hate Agile" - which I'm co-presenting with friend, colleague and career tester Malcolm Beaton. On Wednesday the 26th of August at 2pm it's "The Prisoner's Dilemma: Applying Game Theory to ...

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 ...

For the last few months I, with the help of fellow work colleague Kate Begley, have been working on the writing the reports for the Scrum for Team System V3 process template, which Beta 1 has been released and details are available from http://blogs.conchango.com/sfts/archive/2009/07/28/scrum-for-team-system-v3-beta-programme.aspx. There are a ...

So, there’s been a bit of storm blowing through the part of the InterWeb that I inhabit recently – see http://blog.benday.com/archive/2009/07/27/23233.aspx for the low-down. I’ve seen these types of discussions countless times, both online and in the real world – the thing that wears me down the most is the seemingly constant assertion that ...