Scrum for Team System 2010 - How to use story points instead of Hours

Question

I have installed TFS 2010 using the Scrum for Team System v3. The work item templates want you to enter a Project Backlog Item that includes story points, then you need to add linked tasks as a child of the PBI. It is at the task level where you can assign team individuals, update estimated hours left, etc.

What is the importance of the Story Points used at the PBI item if individual tasks are using hours?

Has anyone customized this template so that the child work item tasks use story point burn downs instead of hours? Also, I would be nice to have the total number of story points from each individual task roll up into the PBI item as a read only field for total story points.

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

The company that I work for is also using TFS 2010 with the new Agile Template v5.0. We are going about the process in the following way and having some success. The hardest thing we have done to date is try to wrap everyone's head around the idea that Story Points do not directly equate to any form of hours.

We start the process with a Release Planning meeting, this is done once a week but if you have never done one you probably want to start with one first. We have 3 teams and only the product owners and team leaders are in the meeting, it would just be to large to manage if we were all there. It is at this Release Planning meeting that we, the team leaders only, play planning poker to assign Story Points to User Stories.

Then we have a Sprint Planning Meeting where a team and the Product Owners and Stake Holders will agree to a number of user stories to execute one in a sprint. The Story Points, after a few sprints, give you an idea of how many you can actually don in one sprint. Each User Story is discussed with the product owner and usually the Scrum Master is adding tasks to the User Stories as they hear the team talk them through.

Now the Product Owner and Stakeholders go away. The Team then goes about dividing the work amongst itself and assigning hours (Original Estimate) to each task. After that is done the Team goes to work, usually two weeks but I can see us doing a three week sprint if the sprint just couldn't be nailed down to two weeks.

As we work we adjust the Hours Completed and Hours Remaining with no regard for the original estimate. If we have spent 3 hours so far and after 3 hours we think it is going to take 2 more that is what is on the task, it doesn't matter that the Original Estimate was 4 hours.

Because we have "filled in the boxes" and not adjusted the template all of the reports and the cube just work. We don't need to make any large adjustments to the reports or anything to capture some really nice metrics. If you want a template that is simpler you should take a look at the "Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0" from the Visual Studio Gallery. It is simpler for sure but offers less reports and less support in the way of integrated Office documents.

Mircosoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0

Answer 2

We ended up using the TFS Agile template, but just ending up using the "Effort Hours" in the work item tasks and refer to them as story points.