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Work in sprints

You can use sprints to schedule your work in intervals of time. You can also break down the work to be done in the sprint, to better understand who's doing what. Use the task board for daily work and to track progress.

 

Assign items from the backlog to the sprint

  1. If you haven't already, create your backlog and specify your sprint schedule.

  2. From the backlog page, move the items that you expect to work on into the current sprint.

    Move tasks into the current sprint in TFS

    That’s your initial guess at what you’ll be able to do in the sprint. Next, you’ll define tasks, estimate that work, and use your team’s capacity to make sure it fits in the sprint.

Set your team's capacity

Setting capacity helps you make sure you’re taking on the right amount of work in the sprint. And, as you work day-to-day, you’ll be able to see if your team is on track.

  1. Go to the capacity tab for the sprint and set the daily capacity for each team member.

    Setting capacity per day for team members in TFS

    If you have teammates who work on multiple teams, set capacity accordingly.

  2. If you have days during this sprint where the whole team is off, set them so the sprint capacity reflects that.

    Setting days off for the team

  3. Individual team members can enter their days off, too.

    Setting days off for individuals

  4. If you assign work by activities when you plan your sprint, allocate individual capacities to an activity.

    Setting activity types

Break the items down into tasks

  1. In the sprint backlog, add a task.

    Adding tasks to a backlog item in TFS

  2. Give the task a name, and estimate the work it will take.

    Name the task and estimate the amount of work

  3. Just like with your backlog, you can add tags to tasks and other work items to help you sort and identify the work you're doing in the sprint.

  4. After you've added some tasks, your backlog looks something like this.

    What a backlog looks like

Use the task board

The task board is at the heart of daily standups that occur in Scrum. Let's look at some of the things you can do with the task board to facilitate these meetings and visualize progress.

  1. Move tasks on the task board to reflect their current state.

    Drag and drop tasks on the taskboard

  2. You can assign a task to a specific person.

    Change an assignment on the taskboard

  3. Update the remaining work by either using the drop-down list, or typing a specific value.

    Update hours on the taskboard

    As you change the amount of remaining work, or move tasks from one state to another, the amount of remaining work for that column updates to reflect your changes.

  4. If you discover work during the sprint, use the plus sign to add a task to the backlog item.

  5. You can filter the task board by person, and the stories where they don't have any tasks are collapsed.  

    By person view on the taskboard 

  6. Or you can see all tasks organized by team member.

    See all tasks by team member

We just walked through using the task board, including changing the state of work items, updating hours, and changing assignments.

Q & A

Q:Can I estimate my tasks or capacity in something other than hours?

A:Yes.  The remaining work field on the Task work item is just an integer, as is the capacity field in capacity per day. Just make sure that you use the same measurement for both fields, and ignore the little 'h' when it appears.

Q:How can I tell when I have enough work for a sprint?

A:As you add estimated tasks to the items in the sprint backlog, you can tell how each task uses up your capacity.

You can see whether your team, as a whole, has the capacity to complete the work.

A view of work for all team members

If you assign work to individuals when you plan the sprint, you can see whether each individual has the capacity for the work assigned to him.

A view of the by team member

Or, if you assign work to activities, you can make sure each activity is within capacity.

A view of the work by activity type

The colors of the capacity bars help you understand whether you still have capacity remaining, whether you are over capacity, or whether you are simply looking at the total work without any reference to capacity.

Assess capacity at a glance

Q:Why does the drop-down on the task board only contain certain names?

A:The task board is designed to help your team manage their work, so it only contains the names of team members. 

Q:Can I track my work if I belong to more than one team?

A:Yes. Track your work for each team you belong to.

Q:Can I predict how much work my team can accomplish?

A:Yes. Learn how to forecast a sprint .

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