Scrumming with WSS

I generally try to use Scrum with most of my projects. Even if they’re my small, one-man pet projects I still follow Scrum principles (except I don’t have daily standups with myself, that would just be silly). So I try to keep a product backlog, create sprints for myself and work things into the sprint backlog. Grant you, for the one-man projects and things I do for fun I’m always the customer and the customer is always right. It’s a good process and I try to evangelise it as often as I can when working with clients to help them along the process of not doing too much up-front design and spending gobs of time creating reams of documents nobody is going to look at and will be out of date by the time the first line of code is written.

Anyways, with Visual Studio Team System there are a few options coming out. VSTS comes with the Microsoft built-in MS for Agile framework which isn’t bad (it’s not great from an Agile perspective as there are just too many things going on and you need a work item to scratch your ass) as well there are some other things in the works that are more aligned with what Agile, and in particular Scrum are about.

However there’s the cost. Not only the hefty price tag that comes with VSTS and it’s various flavours but the cost of ramping up your people to work in the new IDE, the cost of training your testers to work completely in the new environment, and well the cost of just everything. It adds up and for the smaller shops it’s just not a good fit. Expecially if you do Agile and need/want/desire something lightweight. A spreadsheet might do but why not use WSS? Some people were asking me if the recently released Team Room (renamed to Team Worksite for whatever reason) would be a good fit for this. It might but I thought we could do better.

I have a template in the final staging that might work for you. It’s based on Scrum and follows the principles of Scrum (Product Backlog, Sprint, Sprint Backlog Items, etc.) and takes much from Ken Schwaber’s excellent book, Agile Project Management with Scrum (ISBN: 073561993x) which is a great resource.

The template needs some work and I’m just debating how to distribute it now. The problem is that there are some lookups across lists which can’t be setup in a site definition but then having it as a STP file would be easy to upload and use. I’ll probably create both so you can twiddle with it, but each will have advantages and disadvantages (for example, in the site definition I can change the names of the headings on views without changing the display names of the fields themselves but I can’t do that in an STP file).

Anyways, take a look (click on the image above for the full-meal deal) and let me know what you think. Who knows. Maybe we can evolve the template to include custom web parts so you can have a VSTS replacement for the cheap bastards out there.

Note: The Iteration Progress chart is just a static image, there’s no live charts in the system (yet).