As I mentioned, I received numerous questions during my presentation at the WI .NET User Group a few weeks back.  One of the them was: “Is there a way to add the subject of a user story as an explicit field?”  After probing the individual a bit, I discovered he wanted to be able to sort user stories bases on this field.  As a recap a user story is typically in the form:

As a <type of user> I want <some goal> so that <some reason>

In this post I will show you how to add the <type of user> or user story role to the user story in TFS 2010.

First make sure you have TFS Power Tools installed.  For the TFS 2010 RC, download them here.

Second, I’m going to show you how to do it using the MSF for Agile v5.0 User Story Work Item Type (WIT).  While other templates are going to be slightly different, you can use this same method as a general guideline on how to do this.

Step 1:

Open the “User Story” WIT from the Server.

Step 2:

On the Fields tab click New.

Step 3:

Setup the new field similar to that below.  You will probably want to change “MyCompany” in the Reference name to be the name of your company.

Step 4:

Still in the Field Definition dialog, click on the Rules tab.

Step 5:

Click New, select ALLOWEDVALUES and click OK.

Step 6:

In the ALLOWEDVALUES dialog continue to click new and enter the desired roles until you have all the roles you want to use.

Step 7:

Click OK back to the WIT editor.

Step 8:

Go to the Layout Tab.

Step 9:

Right click on the Column node under Group – Classification and select New Control.

Step 10:

Setup the fields similar to the following:

Step 11:

Click Save.

Your’re Done!

Your User Story screen should now resemble the following:

You will also be able to add the Story Role column to queries and sort and filter by it.

Good luck and enjoy!

Making the transition to Agile can be challenging for even the most seasoned organization. Having good leadership and the right tools can make all the difference. Drawing on nearly two decades of experience Chad will be walking us through methods that can be used to avoid common pitfalls and using Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 as an Agile platform. In this highly interactive session, Chad will demonstrate some of the new features of TFS 2010 as they relate to Agile estimation, planning, execution and measurement. If your organization is considering a migration to Agile or the TFS 2010 platform, you are encouraged to attend.

I presenting the above topic tonight at the Wisconsin .NET User Group.  Register Here!

I will also be giving the same presentation at the Madison .NET User Group on March 3rd.  Register Here!

Look for a presentation in the Chicago Land area towards the end of March.

Inspired by Michael Dubakov's article Flow. Discover Problems and Waste in Kanban, I thought I’d spend some time looking at Value Stream Analysis.

We talk a lot these days about delivering value to our clients, but many of us don’t understand the details of how that is accomplished.  Sure we understand that raw ones and zeros couldn’t be sold for the same amount as the aggregated application, but let’s take a more concise look at a couple questions?  1) How do we define value.  and 2) How do we analyze the process by which we deliver value? (Value Stream)

The first question we seek to better understand is the definition of value.  Without diving head first into an economics discussion, we can simply look at value as our client’s perceived worth of the product or service we provide.  This has a dollar figure attached to it.  While one can argue that value is also inclusive of the qualitative aspects of our product or service, it is not easily measured, so for purposes of this discussion can be ignored.  I defined a method of assigning a dollar value to SaaS features in one of my previous posts.  This method can also be used to determine the dollar value of a release, iteration, feature or task on either products or services.  With a dollar value in hand we can begin to look at answering question #2.

As we begin to examine our Value Stream, I would be remiss without mentioning the work of all the people that have contributed work in this area, Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Taiichi Ohno, James Womak, Kent Beck, Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck, to name just a few.  In Tom and Mary’s book Lean Software Development, they present Tool #2 - Value Stream Mapping which gives us a good way to visually represent our Value Stream:

If we look at the figure above, we see the typical steps that an Agile team may follow transforming an idea into reality.  There is active work that is done on the idea/feature (above the line, value add) and time when the idea/feature sits dormant. (below the line, waste)  Examining the timing of the above hypothetical flow, we can see that the overall process took 18 weeks with 11 weeks (61%) delivering value and 7 weeks (39%) of waste.  This example is a bit far fetched but is meant to provide a simple means of showing how the map works.  You may find it more useful to use days as a unit-of measure or even hours.  The point here being that you may be able to reduce your feature time to market to only 11 weeks if you could only avoid wait time.  If we assume that the feature we are developing will provide $5000 of value in the market, (to our clients) then at 18 weeks we are only delivering $278 of value a week, whereas we hit $455 a week when we do it in 11 weeks.

This can be a very useful tool for improving the productivity of your development organization but we need one more piece to make it effective.  Since we are not developing one feature at a time we need to understand the effects of multiple features flowing through our value stream.  If we only seek to optimize the flow of one feature’s flow we may do that at the expense of others.  We must look at the system as a whole and try to optimize elements that will reduce our wait time for all ideas/features currently in progress.  This is not an easy task.  You should look at the steps that are costly first and try to identify the pain points in those steps.  For instance, if there are days lost because team members are unaware of a status change, seek to implement a tool that sends automated emails on status change.

In summary, here are the steps to analyze your value stream:

1. Create a map of the steps that an idea takes from concept to delivery.
2. Measure the value-add and wait time of a number of ideas as they flow through this map.
3. Assign a dollar value to your ideas and measure your current weekly value and share this with the team.
4. If changes were already made to try to increase the flow of value, did they work? By how much?
5. As a team, come up with changes that will increase the flow of ALL ideas through the system.
6. Implement these new changes and go back to #2.

I am happy to announce that we (Rangers) have released the new Requirements Management Guidance for TFS 2010!

This Ranger solution addresses the People, Process, and Technology guidance for Requirements Engineering (RE) using Team Foundation Server. The goal of this guidance is to provide formalized Microsoft field experience in the form of recommended procedures and processes, Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server configurations, and skill development references for the Requirements Engineering discipline of your application lifecycle.

Visual Studio ALM Rangers
This guidance is created by the Rangers who have the mission to provide out of band solutions for missing features or guidance. This content was created with support from Microsoft Product Group, Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) and technical specialists from technology communities around the globe, giving you a real-world view from the field, where the technology has been tested and used.

What is in the package?
Requirements Management is a vast area with many disciplines. To address your areas of interest and expertise, we have packaged the content in 9 zip files. The default download is the complete package in one zip file for those who are interested in all areas.

1. Introduction: RM Rangers Guide to the Complete Guide Start Here
2. Requirements Management Planning
3. Requirements Traceability
4. Analysis and Breakdown
5. Requirements Elicitation
6. Requirements Specification
7. Requirements Validation
8. Requirements Change Management and Approval
9. Requirements Management checklist sheet

Great job Mike Schimmel & the rest of the team!

For those of you out there doing TFS 2010 presentations and demos, here is the TFS “stadium graphic” with the new SKUs and branding.

Enjoy!