#tfs11

Agile Project Management

With this release, agile teams can quickly and easily define and manage their product backlog and run their sprints or iteration. You can access these features through Team Web Access. You can also learn more about these features from Brian Harry’s post: Agile Project Management in Visual Studio ALM V.Next.

Define and Manage Teams

Within team projects, you can now define and manage Teams. This feature supports small teams working on different product areas to manage their backlog and iteration cycles, separate from other teams. You define and manage team membership through Team Web Access. Users can belong to several teams and quickly move back and forth between different team contexts. You manage team members through the Administration mode in Team Web Access.

Define and Manage the Product Backlog for a Team

Backlog page: Define product backlog items and user stories, define tasks for backlog items, drag-and-drop items to specify backlog priority and assign to iterations, view items assigned to sprints, set team capacity, view individual work load, and more.

To learn more, see Create the Backlog with Team Web Access.

View and Interact with the Task Board

Task Board page: View the status of tasks and remaining hours for each backlog item or user story defined for the current iteration. Add tasks, and drag and drop tasks to change status. Open items to modify remaining work.  View work for the team or by team member.

View Burndown Charts and Team Capacity

View an always up-to-date Burndown chart of the current or past iterations. Data in this chart comes from the data store and therefore always reflects the latest data available. Just click the thumbnail image in the upper-right corner of the backlog or board pages. Here’s a sample image:

Agile Requirements Management

To help teams build the right software, the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview includes several new tools to support definition of requirements and getting feedback on requirements from product stakeholders. Two of these tools are PowerPoint Storyboarding and Microsoft Feedback Manager.

PowerPoint Storyboarding

You can quickly prototype a new or modified interface by using PowerPoint Storyboarding. With this tool you can build a storyboard from a collection of pre-defined storyboard shapes, capture existing user interfaces and customize the layouts of your storyboard, and link the storyboard to a work item stored in Team Foundation Server. To learn more, see Storyboard a Backlog Item by Using PowerPoint.

  Microsoft Feedback Manager

Microsoft Feedback Manager allows stakeholders to capture their feedback comments in the form of text, annotated screenshots, video, audio, and an overall rating. Stakeholders can select from one or more stories or features that they have been asked to review.

To learn more, see  Provide  Feedback by Using Microsoft Feedback Manager.

Source:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2011/09/20/visual-studio-team-foundation-server-11-developer-preview-what-s-new-for-team-foundation-server.aspx#agile_pm

New Look and Feel for both Team Web Access and Team Explorer

Both Team Web Access and Team Explorer have undergone a face-lift both inside and out. Many of the improvements were made to increase performance, to minimize the number of round-trips to the server, to support a richer UI experience, and to deliver a more scalable and extensible UI.

Team Web Access: Faster, Lighter, More Extensible

Team Web Access has been re-engineered to be lighter, more scalable, and extensible.

One of the things you’ll notice right off in the Developer Preview is the lighter, faster, and feature-rich pages with Team Web Access. As you can see from the image below, the familiar pages – home, work items, source, and build – have been joined by 3 new pages: backlog, board, and alerts.

Try out these enhancements and notice the improvement to performance and overall ease of use:

Create a work item and save a work item – notice how fast this action now occurs! Opening and saving a work item is at least 10 times faster or more than the previous releases.

On the backlog and board pages, you can drag and drop work items to change priority, status, or assign to a different iteration.

With the addition of Teams within a team project – you can now view specifics for a team and team members.

Team Explorer – Adds Search Box, My Work, Pending Changes, and Distinct Pages

Many of the changes that you’ll see in Team Explorer have been added to support developers to do their work more efficiently – to turn Developer’s Into Raving Fans! Particularly the My Work and Pending Changes features – described below in Developing Code and Using Team Explorer.

In addition to the Home page, each “node” now has its own page – as shown with the Work Items page below, and a convenient search box which works just like the one for Team Web Access.

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview ALM Virtual Machine with 6 hands-on-labs and demo scripts can be found at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2011/09/16/visual-studio-11-application-lifecycle-management-virtual-machine-and-hands-on-labs-demo-scripts.aspx

The virtual machine is a Hyper-V machine and works with Windows Server 2008 R2.

This virtual machine is configured with:

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Ultimate Developer Preview

Microsoft Team Foundation Server 11 Developer Preview

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010

Microsoft Project 2010

Microsoft Office Professional 2010 (Word, PowerPoint, Excel)