In my last post, I showed how I’ve modified the State field of my TFS Work Item definitions to resemble my Kanban workflow. This post we’ll take a look at how I’ve configure my digital board and highlight the pros and cons of my current approach. Maybe you’ll find this useful, maybe you’ve got some recommendations – either way, I’d love to hear from you.
Setting things up
- Download and install the SEP Digital Kanban board: http://www.sep.com/labs/teamworks/
- Run the MSI. Defaults all the way through.
- Run the app. You’ll need to configure the board with a few settings.
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Pick a server:
- Select your TFS Server:
- Select your TFS project and select a Query that returns all your work items. I have a small query to return only Tasks and Bugs:
- In order to get the workflow correct, you’ll need to manually order the States of the Work Item. Change the Work Item States –> Order.
The Item states should be in this order:
- Proposed
- Active
- Selected
- In Development
- Ready for Test
- Testing
- Acceptance
- Closed
- Depending on your Project collection, you may have additional work item definitions with their own states. You may have to turn off any states that aren’t included in our work item states. (This screen shot shows Resolved, Design and Ready states have been turned off)
- Set up some limits.
Cool Features
Touch enabled: While the main feature that I was interested in was representing my tasks in TFS, what sold me on this tool was the fact that it was designed for touch. My HP TouchSmart now operates as our digital kanban board.
Swim lanes: Another great feature is the ability to view the features in their own collapsible Swim Lane. There are many great uses for swim lanes such as grouping by Area, Iteration, Priority, Assigned to, Triaged, etc. Most scalar value fields can be used. What’s also great about this feature is that you can simply drag a work item into a swim lane to assign that field value. This makes it easy to keep your work items organized.
Create or Edit Work Items: The tool takes advantage of the form layouts defined in the work item definition, so you can get the same TFS Team Explorer editor experience right on your Kanban board. Large buttons at the top of the user-interface make it simple to add new bugs or tasks as they arrive, and I can open an item from a context-menu to get or edit details about the task at hand.
Caveats and Annoyances
Tasks and Bugs: Unfortunately, I’m only tracking Task and Bug work items because these are the items that I’ve customized. I would like to Use Stories where I describe the work as a high level story and then realize that effort in tasks. At the moment, I’m using TFS 2008 which doesn’t support hierarchal tasks, so I’m kind of stuck on that. If I could track hierarchal tasks, I’m not entirely sure how I would use this tool – where should the Stories appear on the board if only some of the development tasks are complete?
No sub-columns: One of the features that this tool lacks is that ability to create sub-columns. Ideally I would like to treat Development as one column with two sub-columns (“In Development” and “Ready for Test”) and put a WIP limit on Development. Having this capability highlights testing bottlenecks and would ensure that the development team is invested in seeing their completed efforts are delivering into the client’s hands.
No central configuration: While I’m sure that the target usage for this application is to use it on a touch-device as a whiteboard replacement, the tool doesn’t offer any means to save the configuration externally or toggle between configurations. This is a minor annoyance because most of my team members are jumping on board with this tool to provide their status updates. Also, as I have multiple projects, a means to jump between configurations would be ideal.
All in all, it’s a great resource.
My next post will talk more about customizations to the Work Item definitions that support my workflow.
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