TFS Preview - Creating Product Backlog

This post is continued from TFS Preview – Creating an Account & Projects so if you haven’t read that and are interested in knowing how to create a project in TFS, reading that article is worth while.

Also since the focus of this article is TFS for SCRUM (Agile methodology), it would make sense in knowing history of Agile and having some basic knowledge of SCRUM on Wikipedia.  However, a brief information about Product Backlog and Agile terms will be provided as we progress.

Product Backlog – Product Backlog is a task sheet and is little different from a TO-DO list.  The difference comes in the way a product backlog and its items are dealt with in a SCRUM process.

• An item in Product Backlog refers to a functional or a non-functional feature that adds some value to the customer
• A product backlog does not contain granular details or low-level implementation details or artefacts of a task.
• Items higher in priority or to be included in the current Sprint are listed above than those out of the scope of current Sprint.
• Each item in product backlog is assigned to an individual in the team.

  A product backlog

With this let’s proceed to creating a Product Backlog items in TFS for our project CInject that we created in our previous article.

Click on the Project in the browser and then on the button “Product Backlog Item” and enter the details requested.

Here ‘Create UI’ is the title of the Product Backlog Item and assign it to …  Oh, you do not have any team members in your team.  Let’s stall this process here and first add a team member.  If you figured out how to add a team member, you can skip the next section.

Adding a Team Member to your project

Click on the Home Toolbar and then on “Manage all members…” link

If you are using TFS Preview (or TFS over cloud) you will be required to enter the Live Id of your team member.  If you are using TFS for Enterprise, you will require to enter EmployeeId, or Email Address

Having done that, let’s get back to creating a backlog item.

Creating a Product Backlog Item

You can fill in the required (and obvious) details as I have done and click on Save and Close button.  You can add attachments, external links, any acceptance criteria.  Now this Product Backlog Item can have multiple sub-tasks in it.  When creating a graphical UI, you are required to create Toolbars, Menu strip and some widgets.  So let’s click on Tasks tab and add a sub-task (click on ‘New Linked work item’).  The sub-tasks will be referred to as ‘Work Items’ to a Product Backlog Item.

I’ve created 3 Work-Items for the Item ‘Create UI’ and when clicked on “Work” Menu we get the project dashboard for Sprint 1 as shown below

Backlog View

Storyboard View of the backlog items

That’s how a Product Backlog Item is created and Work Items in each PB Item are added.  In the next article, the focus would be updating the tasks and tracking the progress – a task each SCRUM Master does.