Agile Planning and Work Management with VSTS Dan Gartner Jason Keicher

Agile Planning and Work Management with VSTS Dan Gartner Jason Keicher

Dan Gartner Brian Spann @dgartner 9/17/2018 2:28 PM Dan Gartner Developer Technology Specialist with Microsoft Been with Microsoft for 8 years helping customers implement ALM and DevOps practices Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Developer Born and raised in Chicago Graduate of Illinois Institute of Technology @dgartner © 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

Jason Keicher @jason13013 Born and Raised in New Jersey 5 years at Microsoft, New York Metro Developer Tools 10 years as founder and CTO of development and cloud startup based in New Jersey Graduate of New Jersey Institute of Technology Tottenham, Knicks, Rangers, and Red Bulls fan @jason13013

Agenda Overview of Work Management with VSTS 9/17/2018 2:28 PM Agenda Overview of Work Management with VSTS Configuration Iterations, Areas and Teams Visualizing KPIs with Dashboards, Queries and Charts Managing the Product Backlog & Kanban Boards Planning and Managing a Sprint Overview of Work Management - Discuss Work items & Links & Tags - Show work item form - Show extensions Configuring Iterations and Teams - Create a couple teams Setup iterations Configure the hierarchical backlogs Configure bugs on the backlog Dashboards, Queries and Charts - show the dashboards - Customize it - Add a widget - Customize a chart - Customize the color of a query - Run a query - Create a new querru Create a chart from the query Add the chart to a dashboard Show the DevOps dashboard Managing the Product Backlog and Kanban board - Add a workitems Prioritize it © 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

Determine the Types of Work you track Process Templates Determine the Types of Work you track Customizable One per Team Project SCRUM CMMI Agile Common Work Item Types: Code Review Request / Response Test Case / Shared Steps Feedback Requests

Creating a Team Project Select a process template Name can be changed later Version Control can be changed later

Teams, Areas and Iterations Teams are a group of people Iterations are time boxes Areas control what is on the team’s backlog

Demo: Getting Started Create a Team Project, Configure Team and Iteration

Work Items Vary depending on your process template Customizable and extensible Can be linked to any other work item Can be linked to code changes

Project management dashboards Project summary ‘at a glance’ Key project planning & management functions Customize with favorite metrics Now we’ll look at the agile planning features provided: Managing Your Project from a central dashboard : Effectively managing your Project’s workload across the whole application lifecycle can be a daunting task, particularly in a continuous cadence of delivering value in shorter cycle times Thanks to the full lifecycle integration capabilities of Microsoft’s ALM solution, all the work – including Product Backlog Items, Tasks, Test Cases, Bugs, Feedback and Issues, can be linked together. This provides you with excellent visibility, traceability and reporting features to support project planning and management. At the heart of this, the Project’s ‘Home’ page that is available in both the Project Portal and Team Foundation Service, consolidates key links, reporting and other project management information into a powerful project dashboard. This can be customized to show ‘tiles’ with favorite query results that provide an ‘at a glance’ summary of the overall project status. This provides Business/Product Owners and PMs with direct visibility into all development and testing, supplying the information needed to make them more productive* and keep them happy with progress being made. *In the March 2013 Forrester Total Economic Impact Report, Business / Product Owners surveyed reported their productivity levels improved, translating to a savings of 3 hours a week, through being able look up project status information on their own, spending less time doing UAT and generally having access to their solutions more quickly.

Visualize KPIs with Dashboards and Charts

collaboration and planning the Backlog Backlog kept at high readiness Users / Stakeholders Developers / Testers Operations The Product Owner / PM leads collaboration of Users / Stakeholders, Developers, Testers and Operations to : Create a Product Backlog prioritize the ‘quick wins’ - those features perceived as providing the most business value. define requirements and acceptance criteria for each of these features Team collaboration accelerates decision making and increases likelihood that requirements are captured correctly Use of familiar tools can ease the definition of requirements – for example, Using PowerPoint for storyboarding Using Microsoft Office applications with Partner offerings The Product Backlog needs to be kept at a state of high readiness to improve team productivity – when the Backlog is not ready, team performance is reduced Accelerated decision making Familiar tools to ease definition Agreement on requirements Prioritize by Value

Using the Kanban Board to optimize work flow Visualize state of all work Optimize workflow across functions Set work in progress limits Customize Columns Instead of the Product Backlog view of a list of work items, Kanban provides a visualization of the flow of work being delivered – all the way from the Backlog through Development / Testing to the customer Kanban is about optimizing workflow throughout the whole team so that a continuous flow of value is delivered The flow of work can be managed by limiting the amount of work in progress (WIP) : For example, there may be many items being completed by Dev, but these may be too many for testers to consume – resulting in the workflow being restricted. Therefore, value is not being delivered to the customer at a fast enough rate Working on too many items at once has a cost for all the team in having to switch tasks and lose focus By setting a lower WIP limit, then concurrent work is restricted to a smaller number of items, instead of having a large list of items that are not all being completed. Using these Kanban work flow concepts can enable greater discipline in agile teams by extrapolating the “In progress” work state and managing these WIP limits. Kanban can also be used with a ‘waterfall’ (CMMI) process, not just with Agile/Scrum. It has both customizable WIP limits and customizable work states that can enable organizations to gradually adopt more agile flow concepts at their own pace while maintaining current work states and capacity management diligence - without needing to fully replace their current practices until they are ready.

Agile Portfolio Management Agile for large workloads Manage several teams in an organization Get insight from Features and track progress down to Stories and/or Tasks Consolidate portfolio Easy navigation and visualization of complex hierarchy of scenarios Gain understanding of overall project completion across multiple teams Works across Team Projects*

Demo: Viewing Team Progress With Dashboards, the Product Backlog, Kanban Boards and Queries, Portfolio Management

Sprint Planning and Execution Product Backlog Sprint Backlog TOO BIG!

Planning the next sprint Which of the Backlog items can be done next? Effort for each Backlog item is estimated. This is usually done with a subjective measure, such as ‘Story Points’, that is relative to its size. The hours to actually do the work will come later as the Backlog items are broken down into Tasks and assigned to team members. Team velocity is determined by history of how much work has previously been done by the Team The PM / Product Owner applies this velocity to forecast which Backlog Items can be done next Each Backlog Item is estimated in ‘points’ History of work done is Team’s ‘Velocity’ Velocity determines what can be done next

Balancing work with team capacity Once the Backlog items have been selected, planning needs to balance the estimated work against the team’s available capacity for work A team can just use the velocity, or do more detailed planning by breaking down each Backlog item into tasks and assigning them to team members as shown.  Capacity bars indicate whether a team member is over-committed or has remaining capacity to take on more work Tasks identified and assigned Capacity set for team members Capacity bars indicate over / under commitment

Roll-up by PBI or Team Member Status of all work in flight Sprint Task Board Roll-up by PBI or Team Member Status of all work in flight Once the Backlog items have been selected, planning needs to balance the estimated work against the team’s available capacity for work A team can just use the velocity, or do more detailed planning by breaking down each Backlog item into tasks and assigning them to team members as shown.  Capacity bars indicate whether a team member is over-committed or has remaining capacity to take on more work

Burndown chart – will the work get done? charts progress and remaining work Used for adaptive and frequent re-planning As the work is executed, the Burndown chart illustrates progress and the remaining amount of work to be done Adaptive planning will take place - typically, a daily progress meeting (often called the ‘stand-up’) will review this chart and it’s trend, then re-plan accordingly

Demo: Sprint Planning and Execution Managing Tasks, Task Board, Sprint Burndown, Configuring Iterations

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