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How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 1 (Our Process)

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Introduction

Many times, we have been asked: “How does Microsoft uses Team Foundation Server”.

This series of posts will answer that question (at least in part), by taking you through the processes the Developer Division went through to develop the Orcas release.

It’s important to keep in mind that everything I’m showing you is based on the Whidbey version of Team Foundation Server. (Duh … since we were developing Orcas J)

Chapter 1 – Our Process

Here is a picture that represents our process. This process was used for all of Orcas, not just TFS.

image

· Scenarios – Or more appropriately named, business objectives. These laid out the goals the division had for this release.

· Value Prop– The value from the customer perspective. Stated as “Why the customer would pay for this” All value props were traced to Scenarios.

· Experiences – The experience of the customer to realize the value. You can think of them as business level use cases, or scenarios, or epic stories.

· Features – The feature we needed to implement, so to enable the Experience to release the Value Props to meet the divisional goal. Features were the break-down of the work.

Another way to look at this is that Scenarios, Value Props, and Experience are all about planning the release, making sure we do the right thing. Features are about managing the work.

image

To provide perspective, here are the rough volumes of each that we dealt with in Orcas:

image

In future posts, I’ll show you how we managed all of this using TFS.

Next post: Our “Feature Crew” model.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2008
    Very awesome series that is starting here Greg!  I know quite a few people who are interested and from the video Jeff Beehler and Brian did last week it will only peak more interest into this topic. Really looking forward to seeing how the reports actually get generated using the hierarchical data and rollup! Thanks again

  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2008
    Jeff Beehler on Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server - now in Russian. Buck Hodges...

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2008
    In previous posts and I talked about out processes. Today I'm going to introduce how we implemented our

  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2008
    Gregg Boer, a program manager on the TFS work item tracking team has started a series of posts outlining

  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2008
    先月より、なぜか、Chapter 3 が二つありますが、それはご愛敬として・・・まだまだ続きがあるようですの Teams WIT Tools という TFS の開発チーム（主に WIT： Work Item

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2008
    This post was translated from the original post into Japanese. 英語原文: http://blogs.msdn.com/teams_wit_tools/archive/2008/03/27/how-microsoft-devdiv-uses-tfs-chapter-1-our-process.aspx

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2008
    Подгруппа разработчиков Visual Studio Team System, работающая над отслеживанием рабочих элементов в TFS,

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2008
    Kes veel ei tea, siis Workitem Tracking vahendite meeskond Visual Studio Team System -i arendusmeeskonnas

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2008
    Hay una serie interesante de posts que nos explican de que modo la Division de Desarrollo de Microsoft

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2008
    A good read: Applying Value Up at Microsoft by Sam Guckenheimer (also available as 60-minute-webcast

  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2008
    Part of my job is evangelizing Team Foundation Server adoption within Microsoft. A colleague recently

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2009
    In December, I had the privilege to be the “MVP in Residence” with the Team System product group.