Smöråkning : TFS

Scrum Dashboard

anders — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:16:00 GMT

If you're a fan of Scrum and Team Foundation Server you'll probably want to have a look at the Scrum Dashboard recently published on CodePlex by EPiServer. It looks very cool but unfortunately for us it uses the Scrum for Team System templates by Conchango instead of the "vanilla" MSF Agile templates that we're using. Too bad for us, but I applaud EPiServer for making this thing available to the community. Thank's guys!

BTW, I actually met the guy listed as Coordinator of the project (Per Bjurström) on my trip to Redmond last October - that has to be a good sign, right?

Structure for Organizing Team Projects

anders — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 08:25:00 GMT

As seen in previous posts, I have just started messing around with Team Foundation Server. My next area of concern is actually how to divide and organize all our current and future .NET solutions and services into Team Projects. As I wrote in a forum post on MSDN:

We are gradually moving to a more and more SOA-based approach where we have lots of rather fine-grained solutions, each of which contains something like 2-4 projects (DAC/BLL/WebService layers etc). All services use a common framework (for the most part using EnterpriseLibrary but with some custom extension) and there are also some dependencies between services. On top of this, we have a couple of web sites (internal and external) and some smart clients that consumes the above-mentioned services.

What would be a good way of organizing this? I guess we want a separate project for the common framework. Should we then have one project per service? Or should we try to group "related" services into larger projects? Or should we try to mimic our organization (i.e. try to map projects in MS Project to projects in TFS) which, for example, would mean creating a new project for every major release.

I did (finally) find some pointers on MSDN, but they basically say "you can structure it any way that seems to fit your needs" which isn't really that helpful. Hopefully, Brian Harry will keep his promise and blog about this soon. In the mean time, I'll probably try a couple of different approaches.

Good news about work items

anders — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:22:00 GMT

Buck Hodges has some good news about how users are displayed in the RTM version of Team System. Instead of using the actual user name (in my case, "1910"), they will use the Display Name instead ("Ljusberg, Anders").

Sure, I'm starting to remember most peoples user numbers by now, but the "Assigned to" drop down is actually rather scary... To be honest, if MS hadn't implemented this I'm not sure we would've been able to use the Work Item tracking functionality of Foundation Server at all.

Team Foundation Server

anders — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 16:25:00 GMT

Another thing I've been looking forward to and finally got to do - installing Team Foundation Server. Now, the minimum requirement for a one-server installation is something like "Pentium IV 2.2GHz or better". Well.. I've just completed an installation on a Pentium II 450 MHz box, and so far so good (haven't played with it yet though.. I imagine it will be painfully slow).