MSF
After clarifying the concepts of tracks, workstreams and activities (see these previous posts), we still felt something was missing in our process template (based on "MSF for CMMI"). A couple of our developers have been working on a lists of tasks for a recent project. They are not involved in the Team System rollout so they are not aware of any of the MSF concepts mentioned earlier. They have organized the work in a hierarchy. For example: Database schema creation Analyse DTS file Analyse Excel...
A few days ago I blogged about a discussion about MSF workstreams, activities, areas and iterations we had at the office (you can read about it here). The final decision (that I did not favour) was to include in our work items a field to indicate the current track/workstream/activity. The possible values were hardcoded like this: The reason I did not like these customization is that I believe this information has no place in work items. Workstreams and activities are like cooking recipes and their...
During the past week I have been busy creating a Team System process template to be used by the MSFT Development group where I work. While discussing this topic with my boss and showing him how the MSF for CMMI work items look like, he asked that I add a field to indicate the current track, workstream and activity. To be more precise, he asked me to use the "Area path" field for workstreams and activities, and to add an extra field to specify the track. I proceeded with these changes (yes, a bit...