1. Agile Planning and Work Management with VSTS
Dan Gartner
Jason Keicher

2. Agile Planning and Work Management with VSTS
Dan Gartner
Jason Keicher

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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.

6. 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

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

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

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

10. 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

11. 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.

12. Visualize KPIs with Dashboards and Charts

13. 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

14. 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.

15. 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*

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

17. Sprint Planning and Execution
Product Backlog
Sprint Backlog
TOO BIG!

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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

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

24. Art resources Success stories Mobile & Web Developers
Network, Infrastructure, & Cloud Engineers
Database Admins, Architects, & Developers
Students
Game Developers
Educators
Success stories

25. Art resources