Course:

Course Description

This 3-day course provides Project managers, Scrum masters and Team leads the essential skills required to effectively manage a software development project using Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2018.

This course focuses on Agile methodologies and includes discussions and content focused on both Scrum and Kanban practices. We look at how TFS supports the team during the sprint planning and daily Scrum events, as well as how to create and manage the product backlog and sprint backlog artifacts.

In this course, attendees will plan a new software development project and go through the steps to initiate the project using Team Foundation Server 2018. This includes recording requirements, creating a product backlog and estimating effort for backlog items. We’ll cover planning and running a sprint as well as using the taskboard and burndown chart to track progress.

The course also covers using storyboards to prototype experiences, requesting stakeholder feedback, team collaboration and reporting.

This course includes hands-on labs to reinforce practical skills and ensure you’re ready to use the tools on your return to your workplace. All Scrum content adheres to the latest version of the official Scrum Guide and provides helpful preparation for anyone considering gaining Scrum certification.

Outline

Module 1: Introducing the Microsoft Visual Studio Family

What’s new in Visual Studio
Overview of the Visual Studio family
Overview of product features
Project workflow across the Visual Studio suite of products

Module 2: Initiating a New Project

Organizing projects in TFS
Understanding process templates
Creating a new team project
Setting team project properties

Module 3: Getting Our Team Started

Configuring Teams in our Team Project
Adding people to Teams
Reviewing Team settings

Module 4: Creating our Product Backlog

Understanding Requirement types
A review of User Stories
Creating backlog items in TFS
Traceability between work items
Creating requirement hierarchies using features
The importance of acceptance criteria

Module 5: Enhancing Requirements

Creating and recording personas
Overview of storyboarding capabilities
Creating a storyboard to illustrate a requirement
Linking a storyboard to a work item

Module 6: Agile Estimation

Introduction to Agile estimation
Using story points
Planning Poker and other popular estimation techniques
Adding your estimates to TFS work items

Module 7: Working in Sprints (Planning)

Our Sprint planning meeting
Specifying your sprint schedule and your team capacity
Selecting items for the sprint backlog using forecasting
Decomposing requirements into tasks
Using burndown charts to track progress
Monitoring work using the task board
Working with unparented work items

Module 8: Working in Sprints (Execution)

Overview of Agile Testing
A lap around web based test management
Creating manual test cases from requirements
Exploratory testing
Overview of Agile Development
Using My work to select tasks from the sprint backlog
Understanding the value of linking changesets to work items

Module 9: Working in Sprints (Delivery)

Understanding potentially shippable increments
Ensuring you’re ready for the review meeting
Continuous integration
Release Management

Module 10: Retrospectives

The importance of retrospectives
Conducting an efficient sprint retrospective
What you should avoid in your retrospective

Module 11: Working from the Product Backlog

Introducing the Kanban board
Entering and editing details on the Kanban board
Customizing columns, including using split columns and limiting WIP
Recording our Definition of Done (DoD)
Understanding the Cumulative Flow Diagram

Module 12: A Closer Look at Work Items

Overview of work items
Searching and creating custom queries
Work item tagging
Configuring project notifications

Module 13: Tracking Progress with Dashboards and Reports

Work item charting and pinning charts
Creating Dashboards
Overview of Reporting Architecture
Reviewing the out of the box reports
Creating ad-hoc reports using Excel

Module 14: Getting Stakeholder Feedback

The importance of feedback
Requesting and providing feedback
Adding continuous feedback into your workflow

Audience

This course is designed for Project managers, Scrum masters, Business analysts and team leaders looking to effectively manage their development projects using Team Foundation Server 2018.

Prerequisites

Attendees should have some familiarity with the basic use of TFS.

What You Will Learn

At the completion of this course, attendees will be able to:

Describe the full feature-set of Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management suite
Understand how Work Item Tracking (WIT) can be used across the entire team
Search work items and create custom work item queries
Create work item charts and add them to the dashboard
Use a variety of client tools to interact with team members
Initiate a new Team Project
Enter requirements into Team Foundation Server including storyboards to illustrate requirements and experiences
Use the Kanban board to work with the Product Backlog
Record estimates in your requirement types
Plan and run a sprint including tracking progress using taskboards and burndown charts
Understand several of the quality indicators available
Use dashboards to view team performance and quality indicators
Record team capacity and monitor a team’s velocity
Capture quality feedback from stakeholders
Configure notifications for team members
Understand the out of the box reports and what they can tell us about our project
Create adhoc reports using Microsoft Excel

ALMP18: Managing Agile Project Using TFS 2018