Nobody really likes project management and task estimation, but it’s a necessary evil of product development. I’ve seen quite a few ways to handle estimating tasks; some of which work better than others but none of them I would classify as “fun”. Until now… On a current project with a vendor I was exposed to a process and tool called poker planning. It’s a very simple card based game which is used for a group of people to come to a consensus on the estimate for a task list. There is a free tool that will host a game for you called Planning Poker. The process is pretty simple…

1. Come up with the global user story list for the project
2. Import these user stories into the Planning Poker tool
3. The players of the game are the developers who will be implementing the user story, the product owner does not play but needs to be available
4. For each user story do the following in less than 2 minutes each…
5. The product owner gives a quick description of the user story
6. All of the players choose a card which represents the relative amount of work that user story will take to implement; note these are only relative numbers, not absolute man-days
7. All of the cards are turned over for everyone to see.
8. The players with the highest and lowest cards must both explain their rationale behind their high and low choices
9. The turn is played again until their is a consensus about the amount of effort

At the end of the process you have a relative effort value of each user story. The next step is to map and agree on how to translate those values into absolute working days. Once you get into the process it’s quite fun and effective. I suggest you try it out on your next small project or iteration.

One of the new (and awesome) features of TFS 2010 is that you can create deep and complex relationships among work items of various types. This is needed to create rich project tracking and reporting. There isnt a TFS 2010 for Dummies book out yet and I needed a simple way to explain this. Pretty pictures to the rescue!

Here is a visual of how the work items are related. It can be complicated but it is this relationship structure that empowers the whole system. The work items under a user story (children) are either test cases or tasks. Tasks are for when someone needs to do something. Test cases are for things to validate for that user story to be functionally complete. As the tasks are completed, code is being written and functions start to work in the application. When all of the child tasks of a user story are completed, then the user story is code complete… meaning it can be tested. At this stage a tester will look at all of the child test cases of a user story and start to try them in the QA environment. As they find issues the will create bugs which are related to the test case (and associated user story). When all of the test cases are complete with no bugs and all of the tasks are complete it means a user story is complete (and should be working). Also notice there can be another dimension beyond parent and child, that of predecessor and successor. This is used when one task needs to be completed before another can start. An example of this is that a web page’s UI needs to be designed before it can be built. This is useful to determine the calendar date of when a user story will be complete. You can export all of this data to Excel and MS Project if you like.

A couple concepts that are not represented in this diagram code check-ins and builds. As code is checked into TFS it is associated with development tasks. Check-ins are rolled up into builds. Therefore you can garner all sorts of interesting data; bugs in a build, completed user stories in a build, work completed in a build…

Out of the box TFS ships the Task work item with two fields to support classification, Area and Iteration. It’s pretty obvious what Iteration is for (time), but Area can be a bit confusing. In my experience the issue stems from the fact that multiple user types use the TFS system. So you will get a different answer as to what an Area is based on the type of person you are talking with. People on the product & business side tends to think of areas as functional areas of the system (users, commerce, partners, advertising…); however people on the technical side tend to think of areas as the technical component (public website, database, api, mobile application…). Ive seen examples where companies just combined the two concepts into the Area hierarchy; this doesn’t really do anyone any good. The issue here is that these are really two different concepts with each task actually being associated with both concepts. Example; you can have commerce functionality in both the public website and the database. The solution is really quite easy, but nobody really does it… create a new work item field.

Customizing Work Item Types on Team Foundation Server

Field Definition

<FIELD name=”Component” refname=”TadlockEnterprises.TFS.Apollo.WorkItemFields.Component” type=”String” reportable=”dimension” >
<HELPTEXT>The techincal component.</HELPTEXT>
<ALLOWEDVALUES expanditems=”true”>
<LISTITEM value=”Public Website” />
<LISTITEM value=”Admin Website” />
<LISTITEM value=”API” />
<LISTITEM value=”Database” />
<LISTITEM value=”Foundation” />
<LISTITEM value=”Model” />
</ALLOWEDVALUES>
</FIELD>

Form Definition

<Group Label=”Classification”>
<Column PercentWidth=”100″>
<Control FieldName=”System.AreaPath” Type=”WorkItemClassificationControl” Label=”&amp;Area:” LabelPosition=”Left” />
<Control FieldName=”TadlockEnterprises.TFS.Apollo.WorkItemFields.Component” Type=”FieldControl” Label=”&amp;Component:” LabelPosition=”Left” />
<Control FieldName=”System.IterationPath” Type=”WorkItemClassificationControl” Label=”&amp;Iteration:” LabelPosition=”Left” />
</Column>
</Group>

In the TFS configurations I setup for my clients I have the Area field represent the business concept (because the hierarchy makes more sense here) and create a new flat field for the technical component (Component). I then add this field right next to the Area and Iteration fields in the UI. This Component field is also useful in the Bug work item.

All of this works pretty well. My only complaint with this is that you cant create custom work item fields that use the TreePath type, so you cant make the Component field a hierarchy. I’m sure there is some technical reason why this is the case, but Microsoft should just fix it.