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Scrum Meetings in or out of TFS?

Last post 10:18 am February 10, 2016 by Boris Kazarez
2 replies
Richard Fairgrieve
03:00 am February 9, 2016

Apologies if answered elsewhere but I cannot find an answer either here in the forums or by searching with Google. What is best practise when following Scrum using Team Foundation Server (TFS) in terms of placing your scrum meetings as PBI's or not? We have tried a few combinations but yet to find utopia.

Our current practise is for our two-week sprint iteration to start on a Wednesday and end a week on Tuesday - a two week sprint. In TFS we have been running the iteration (sprint) from the Thursday to a week on Monday - a total of 8 development days. This is because the first Wednesday includes the Sprint Planning, which takes half of the day, and the following Tuesday includes the Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective, which takes most of the day. There is also often an estimation session for the Friday afternoon before the end of the sprint.

The problem that I have, as Scrum Master, is that I feel we are loosing visibility in some areas. After Sprint Planning, the team have the Wednesday afternoon to start work but our TFS board shows that the work hasn't started yet. If we start the Sprint in TFS on the Wednesday (my preference) we will need to create a PBI together with associated tasks for each developer, for the Sprint Planning meeting so that it can be burnt down. Then our charts will look correct. We then have the option of whether to change the end date to be a week on Tuesday, rather than Monday, but in this case would have to create a PBI together with associated tasks for each developer, for the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings, otherwise it would look like that we have more time available for development throughout the sprint.

I don't want to micro manage the team via the task board, not create unnecessary PBI's and tasks that will lead to clutter, but I need an effective and accurate burn down chart. What do you guys find that works best for you with TFS?

Ian Mitchell
12:24 pm February 9, 2016

> What is best practise when following Scrum
> using Team Foundation Server (TFS) in terms
> of placing your scrum meetings as PBI's or not?

By definition these events are not Product Backlog Items as they do not constitute part of the product scope, and cannot be prioritized or evaluated in relation to those items which are.

Boris Kazarez
10:18 am February 10, 2016

If your team is collocated I would advise against using TFS for tracking Scrum activities or sprint progress.
The best advice for collocated team is to just use the physical whiteboard with sticky notes and manually synchronize it with TFS PBIs (used mainly to track the history).
Physical boards are much more visible, more engaging for the development team and can be easily customized.
Even though it sounds controversial for our industry to use something so low-tech, it is actually much more fun to move a physical piece of paper on the board than to use some sort of software.
The progress can also be tracked on a whiteboard by updating weekly or daily velocity of done stories (either burndown or cumulative velocity) or by using a shared spreadsheet.

Here is a nice post on this subject:
https://www.scrum.org/Forums/aft/1760

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