Professional Team Foundation Server

13.3. Structuring Your Project

You have three tools at your disposal to organize your project: Microsoft Project, Microsoft Excel, and Team Explorer. No matter what processes you choose to use for your project (agile approach, MSF, or other), a consistent theme should be always apparent. To this end, you need to come up with a vision statement of some sort along with a set of requirements that define the features of the application. In Extreme Programming, the story card is used for that purpose. In MSF, you use scenarios and personas to define the parameters of your project.

NOTE

There are many ways you can define scenarios. On his blog, Randy Miller (the creator of MSF for Agile Software Development) provides his take on how to formulate a scenario. Please refer to http://blogs.msdn.com/randymiller/archive/2006/08/02/686701.aspx.

There is an mismatch with the ways Team System and Microsoft Project handle workflow. Microsoft Project is designed to handle complicated relationships, hierarchies, dependencies, managing tasks cross iteration, and time tracking. Team System, on the other hand, is designed to handle lists (for example, a backlog) only. This makes Team System perfect for managing agile projects but a little more challenging for more structured and complicated projects. You mainly have to rethink the techniques you are used to implement in enterprise project management (EPM).

Team System's project management infrastructure is quite simply a tool created by developers ...