How to manage multiple teams using Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 and TFS [closed]

Question

We are using Scrum 1.0 with TFS to manage our project. There are 2 (soon to be 3) teams who work on different Sprints at the same time. This seems to cause problems for TFS though as the Sprint Burndown charts become skewed and completely incorrect.

I have moved both teams under the same Iteration Path/Sprint and we have been differentiating them by Area. But this is not ideal.

My question is really about how other teams are using Scrum 1.0 to effectively run multiple Sprints at the same time. We would really like to have the Sprint Burndown and Velocity reports for each of the Scrum teams at the very least.

Thanks very much, John

Malita

Two sprints of the same Team Project? Are you sure it's not actually two team projects? – Secure

Hi John, I suppose that's open to interpretation. In a business sense there is only one project, but there are 2 different technologies (CRM 2011 & .NET/Sharepoint) so there are two teams. It has been suggested that we create two separate TFS projects. This could work but would be a bit of hassle. If it was the done thing then I could try selling it to management though – Malita

This is a really good question, and we've been faced with the same problem. The QA team have created estimated tasks for test case design/planning in order to help with capacity planning. But as you have discovered this has knackered the burn down! We assumed you could filter the burn down by 'Activity' type - such as DEV/QA but this isn't the case. – Varitype

Answer 1

We were advised to use the Iteration Path to identify teams. We're using the Agile 5.0 template, but I don't think that matters. We have 8 teams, so we have the iterations set up like this:

\
\Sprint 1
\Sprint 1\Team 1
...
\Sprint 1\Team 8
\Sprint 2
\Sprint 2\Team 1
...
\Sprint 2\Team 8

This is also far from ideal, but using Excel simplifies sprint planning. Each team created their own queries to see their work, and they change the query each sprint. The downside is that none of the built-in reporting works. I read the latest Agile Software Engineering with Visual Studio book, but it did not provide any insight into how this could be done better.

Noman

Thanks for your comments. We have done pretty much the same. It would be nice if this could be handled as I'm sure it's a common problem. – Malita

Answer 2

We tried to do the same thing and ended up just using TFS as if it was one team and one sprint since that was the easiest way for all the reports to work and upper management to see the big picture easily. We created sub reports based on the teams to help drill down.

I'm sure there is a better way in TFS, maybe creating your own field in the template for a team number and modifying the reports. We were not allowed to change anything in the templates.

Norwegian