Unlocking Project Management Potential: A Deep Dive into TFS Preview for Agile Teams

Published on 17 August 2013

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

4 minute read

Link copied to clipboard!

Welcome to my blog! I’m Martin Hinshelwood, a Visual Studio ALM MVP, Visual Studio ALM Ranger, and a professional Scrum trainer. Today, I want to share my insights on TFS Preview, Microsoft’s cloud-based offering that’s making waves in the world of application lifecycle management. If you’re looking to enhance your project management capabilities, you’ll want to pay attention to what TFS Preview has to offer.

What is TFS Preview?

TFS Preview is essentially Microsoft’s cloud-based Team Foundation Server (TFS) solution, available at TFSPreview.com. The best part? It’s free as long as you have a Microsoft Live ID. This makes it an excellent option for teams looking to experiment with TFS without any financial commitment.

Getting Started

Once you log in, you’ll be prompted to choose an account name. For me, it’s Mr Hinch. After that, you can create a new team project, which serves as the central hub for your work. Within this project, you’ll have access to:

Source Control: Keep your code organised and versioned.
Work Item Tracking: Manage tasks, bugs, and features effectively.
Reporting: Gain insights into your project’s progress.
Testing: Ensure your product meets quality standards.

Building Your Backlog

After setting up my team project, I headed straight to the backlog to add some product backlog items. While there are various fields to fill out, I focused on the titles for now. Each item defaults to a state of “New,” which is a great starting point.

As I added items, I noticed a green line indicating where new items would be placed. Once I had my items in, I wanted to stack rank them to prioritise effectively. The beauty of TFS Preview is that it automatically saves your changes behind the scenes, so you can focus on what matters most.

Using the Kanban Board

Next, I navigated to my Kanban board, which features several columns representing different states of work items. Each column has a Work In Progress (WIP) limit, which I set to two for the committed state and four for the approved state. This is crucial for maintaining focus and ensuring that the team isn’t overwhelmed.

I could easily drag items into the approved column, and as I did, the column turned green, indicating that I was within my limits. However, if I tried to exceed the WIP limit, the column would turn red, signalling that I was breaking the rules. While TFS Preview allows you to break these rules, it’s essential to adhere to them for effective workflow management.

Moving Items Through the Workflow

Once I had a couple of items in the committed state, I was able to move them to “Done” as I completed tasks. The visual feedback of the columns changing colour helped me keep track of my progress, and I appreciated how intuitive the interface was.

Exciting New Features

What’s particularly exciting about TFS Preview is that it’s a testing ground for new features that will eventually make their way to the on-premise version of TFS and Visual Studio. For instance, the new cumulative flow diagrams are a fantastic addition for visualising work item flow, although I didn’t have any data to display just yet.

Microsoft is moving towards a tighter release schedule, with new features rolling out every three months. This means that if you’re using TFS Preview now, you’ll be ahead of the curve when these features become available on-premise.

Conclusion

In summary, TFS Preview is a powerful tool for teams looking to enhance their project management capabilities. With its cloud-based nature, ease of use, and innovative features, it’s an excellent choice for both new and experienced teams. I encourage you to sign up at TFSPreview.com and explore the possibilities for yourself.

As always, I’m here to help you navigate the complexities of Agile and project management, so feel free to reach out with any questions or insights you’d like to share!

Welcome to MVP rocks. My name is Martin Henwood. I’m a Visual Studio ALM MVP, Visual Studio ALM Ranger, and professional Scrum trainer. I’m here to talk to you about TFS preview. TFS preview is Microsoft’s cloud-based TFS offering. It’s available on TFS preview.com. It’s free as long as you’ve got our live ID.

Once you’re logged in, you’ll get to choose your account name. My account name here is Mr Hinch. Once you log into your account, you get to create a new team project. Your team project is the bucket within which we’re going to do some work, and you get source control, work item tracking, a little bit of reporting, and tests.

Now that I’ve got a team project called MVP rocks, I’m going to go to my backlog and I’m going to add a few generic items into my backlog. These are product backlog items I’m adding. They have a number of fields, and most of which we’re not bothered about just now. We’re just filling out the title. They do have a state, however, and the state will default to new.

While I’m adding the items, you can see that there’s a green line on the list. That’s the place within which items are going to be added. Once I have all my items added, I probably want to stack rank them in some way so I can reorder my backlog, and that will just automatically save back behind the scenes.

I’m going to go to my Kanban board, and you’ll see that I have a number of columns. These columns represent the states that are available within that work item type. You can see also that there’s a little number at the corner of each of the columns. This is my work item limit or WIP limit, work in progress limit. I’m going to set that to two and commit to two, but actually, I just want to set approved to four.

That’s my backlog. That’s how many things are going to be in my queue to do, and lots of new items we don’t care about. We care about what’s in the approved column, what’s been approved by the product owner. I can just drag items into the correct board or into the approved column. You can see that the column goes green as I’m dragging the items in.

I’m going to put four items in there, and then I probably want to move a couple of items into my committed state. So let me move “create team project” and “add some backlog items,” and you’ll see that I’ve met my work in progress limit for my committed column. I have two of two, and it’s still green.

If I try and drag another item across, you’ll see it’ll go red. It will actually let me break the rules; it won’t enforce the rules. That’s okay. I’m smart enough to know that I shouldn’t be breaking them, so I’m not going to move a new item in. I can, however, move an item over to done, and you’ll see it goes green to indicate that this is all complete.

We’re in the happy, happy state. Now that I have free space in my committed column, I can drag a new item across, and I’m still within the WIP limits, so it doesn’t go red. I don’t get any warnings.

These new features are only available in TFS preview right now. You won’t find them in the RTM version of TFS or Visual Studio. TFS and Visual Studio are both moving to a tighter release schedule. They’re releasing new features every three months, so you will see it on-premise within the next three months because we’ve already had the first RTM shipped version of TFS.

Things like the new cumulative flow diagrams that you see there, I don’t have any data yet, but you see it there. It will be available very soon on the on-premise TFS, but you can use it right now in the cloud by going to TFS preview.com and signing up for an account.

Operational Practices Lean Thinking

Link copied to clipboard!

Connect with Martin Hinshelwood

If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.

Our Happy Clients

We partner with businesses across diverse industries, including finance, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, technology, engineering, transportation, hospitality, entertainment, legal, government, and military sectors.

CR2