Kanban, TFS style.

I’ve been building up a system of tracking tasks using User Stores in TFS for almost two years and I’ve been blogging as I go. Over time, I’ve written several short emails to colleagues pointing them to the Kanban tag of my blog, but that tag list is a bit heavy. Here’s a quick recap of helpful posts that can get you up and running.

Getting Started

If you’re a developer, team lead or architect – you should start here.

1. My first month with Kanban – a quick walkthrough that discusses my initial observations with Kanban. Old school, using a whiteboard and sticky-notes.
2. Using Kanban with TFS – a high level overview of the process I’ve adopted for tracking Tasks in TFS using Kanban columns. Provides an overview of customizing work-items.
3. Configuring SEP Teamworks – a walk through how to set up SEP Teamworks, my favorite free tool for viewing TFS items in a sticky-note fashion.
4. Using User Stories with SEP Teamworks – Revisiting my workflow slightly to adapt to using User Stories instead of just individual task tracking.
5. Setting up Areas and Iterations – Shows you how to organize your stories into TFS Areas & Iterations, and then using SEP Teamworks features to simpli

Reporting and Querying

If you’re a project manager and you want to set up SEP TeamWorks. Please read:

1. Working with TFS WorkItems in Excel – includes a walk through on how to set up your machine, and export queries to Excel.
2. Configuring SEP Teamworks – a walk through how to set up SEP Teamworks, my favorite free tool for viewing TFS items in a sticky-note fashion.

Advanced Customizations

1. What’s new in SEP Teamworks 1.0.31 – highlights some of the new improvements in the latest release: Card Editor to customize views, creating linked work items.
2. Marking Kanban items as Blocked – demonstrates how to customize your work items to take advantage of marking items as blocked.