TFS Usage

I was asked a few questions about TFS by a customer a couple of years ago.... I was rummaging through some of my luggage and found the questionairre. Just thought I would answer the questions with this blog post before throwing it away:

1. How would you breakdown TFS Projects?
The manner in which TFS projects can be broken down is into identifiable work items with tasks associated to them.

2. Once the Work Item is defined, what are the next steps?

The above image does not belong to me but would love to thank the author for the same.


Review the requirements that are assigned to the iteration, and define them in more detail.
•Create task work items for the work that must be performed to implement and test each requirement. Link the tasks to the requirement work item by using the parent link type.
•Set the Original Estimate field of each task.
•Divide tasks that have estimates that are longer than a few days.

•Compare the estimates with the time that is available for the iteration. If the estimate total is too long, simplify some of the requirements, or defer them to later iterations.

3. How is a full life cycle implemented in TFS?
4. What are the core definitions for fields and what is the standard naming convention?

From my perspective, definition of fields and naming convention is basically up to the organization and its individual representation of how they would like to proceed with the TFS project structure. This can be defined or copied from another template defined by some other organization/person. Would definitely recommend leveraging a template based on the same domain to avoid confusion.

Manufacturing --> Manufactureing
Pharma --> Pharma
Information Technology --> Information Technology e.t.c.

The TFS template structure for Scrum as defined by MSDN is as follows (and Microsoft has defined templates for CMMI and Agile as well):

Microsoft's standards are industry standards and would not recommend deviating from the same (or even leverage Google's scrum template as in the following link:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BA9yeFmuA7-mHnvzXLFTLr8LSog_jogoOhs35yLiolA/edit#gid=45

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rhino - ETL

Image
Using Rhino-ETL ( a C# based) framework for developing standard ETL's is pretty easy and one can do a lot of fun stuff with the underlying source data. I just wrote up a quick console app to generate data into a text file and push the same data into a table in SQL Server as well as an external file. Here are the following steps (for the external file push): 1. Create a new C# console application solution in Visual Studio. 2. Target the .Net framework as shown in the below screen shot in your project properties:- 3. Create 3 Sub Folders underneath your project as shown in the following screen shot DataObjects --> Contains the class files associated with each and every table/file in your environment. Example:- if your source file contains student data, then you would create a class file called Student with the individual properties (in relation to the properties) exposed (nouns). Operations --> This primarily contains the class files that contain the activities (a...
Read more

Microsoft acquires LinkedIn

On Monday 6/13/2016, Microsoft announced its acquisition of LinkedIn. This is a major game changer in the world of IT. But before we get to some of the advantages of this acquisition, Microsoft actually was working on a LinkedIn killer on its CRM dynamics platform. The idea was to generate more footprint for its CRM solution as well as create something unique with it. This was started in early 2012 and was way before its actual acquisition of LinkedIn. Here are my thoughts into where this acquisition will lead Microsoft & LinkedIn to: Microsoft gains a huge database of professionals and organizations in various streams: This alone is the most massive gain by Microsoft. It could start targeting professionals/organizations to either move onto the Microsoft platform or join the Microsoft platform which can bolster its sales by a huge margin/ Microsoft integration of LinkedIn ads with Bing: Just imagine an organization trying to establish a marketing campaign. Now with LinkedIn a...
Read more

Redshift Experience

Image
Big Data - the keyword given to solutions that can handle massive amount of data usually in the petabyte or greater amount. There are several big data solutions out there and all of them have their unique characteristics which can be useful in different scenarios. I was looking into Cloudera's versions of Hadoop like Impala, Sentry and HBase. All these vary based on the use case. For some of my clients I have leveraged Amazon Redshift, Cassandra (and hopefully soon Apache Hadoop). The architecture of these systems differ but the end goal is the storage and processing of vast amounts of data down to second or milli second based result generation. Focusing on this aspect I am going to give a more detailed insight on Redshift which is a node based peta byte scaled database as well as a high level overview of what I recently implemented. Note: The above diagram is from the Redshift Warehousing article ( http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_high_level_system_architecture....
Read more