Team Foundation Server - Manage external teams

1
votes

Our company has a small development team in-house but we mostly outsource our customer projects to external consulting firms which we don't manage directly. We only interact with their project manager and maybe a team lead.

I'm implementing TFS 2010 and Scrum for our internal team for Project Management, Version Control and Sharepoint shared documents access.

My problem is how to to manage the external teams.

They won't use our TFS for Version control and I can't forced them to use Scrum and report as such (report on a task level adding remaining hours).

The solution I came with is this:

  • Use the “MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0” template in Team Foundation Server.
  • Break the project into user stories and then create a task for each.

The tasks have these fields:

  1. Original Estimate
    Since we’ll track percentage of completion, this will always be 100.

  2. Remaining
    This is the percentage of remaining work.

  3. Completed
    This is the percentage of competed work.

Their team lead will update the remaining work in percentage for each user story (on the task level). If progress is reported correctly I can print a "Stories Overview" report periodically and see the percentage complete for each user story,

I'm sure it must be a better way out there and I'll appreciate any help on getting to the right direction.

Thanks

1
tfs

1 Answers

0
votes

We are basically doing the same thing ... I have 10 in-house developers and teams around the world working on their projects. Most of the work we do overlaps between external and external. We are using TFS2010. We break a piece of development into user stories into lots of tasks and eventually bugs. We view the status of the external projects by looking at the breakdown of work on the individual work items.

Part of the development process flow is to get the code into TFS source control; and the control of the logs changes as it comes back into our system.

The external PM's then use the web interface spreadsheet upload update the data on these logs (Including the time spent / work remaining) so we can see the state of the work. You don't need code upload to set a work item to test / complete.

The process flow we have on the external work is; on a given user story item you can then see the state of development for all those tasks.

  1. List item
  2. To Spec
  3. Specified
  4. Spec Agreed
  5. Open For Work
  6. WIP
  7. Development Complete
  8. External Test
  9. Source ADded to TFS
  10. Delivered to Internal Test
  11. Internal Test
  12. Complete