What is Sprint in Team Foundation Server

Sprint

In product development, a scrum sprint is a set period of time during which specific work has to be completed and made ready for review.

Each sprint begins with a planning meeting. During the meeting, the product owner (the person requesting the work) and the development team agree upon exactly what work will be accomplished during the sprint. The development team has the final say when it comes to determining how much work can realistically be accomplished during the sprint, and the product owner has the final say on what criteria needs to be met for the work to be approved and accepted.

The duration of a sprint is determined by the scrum master, the team's facilitator. Once the team reaches a consensus for how many days a sprint should last, all future sprints should be the same. Traditionally, a sprint lasts 30 days.

After a sprint begins, the product owner must step back and let the team do their work. During the sprint, the team holds daily stand up meeting to discuss progress and brainstorm solutions to challenges. The project owner may attend these meetings as an observer but is not allowed to participate unless it is to answer questions. (See pigs and chickens). The project owner may not make requests for changes during a sprint and only the scrum master has the power to interrupt or stop the sprint.

At the end of the sprint, the team presents its completed work to the project owner and the project owner uses the criteria established at the sprint planning meeting to either accept or reject the work.

See also: agile development

Plan Your Sprint

In this topic, we cover all major aspects of using the tools available in TFS for sprint planning. We'll begin by creating a sprint backlog. Next, we'll dive into team capacity. Finally, we'll determine what work we can get done in our sprint.

Create Your Sprint Backlog

1. If you haven't already, create your backlog and specify your sprint schedule.
2. In your team project's backlog page, drag backlog items into the current sprint.
   
3. Go to the current sprint's backlog page and add tasks by clicking the + sign to the left of a backlog item.
   
4. Name the task and estimate the work in hours.
   
5. After you've added some tasks, your backlog looks something like this.
   

Set Your Team's Capacity

1. On the capacity tab, set capacity in hours per day for each team member.
   
2. Next, set the team and individual days off.
   
3. We take care of calculating capacity for you.
   
   Here's how we calculate Adam Barr's Capacity:
   First, we calculate the number of working days Adam has left in the sprint. There are 9 remaining days (a), which includes a Team Day Off (b). And, Adam has 4 Days Off (c).
   a - c = 5 working days
   Now we can calculate his capacity by taking the 5 work days x 4 hours per day of capacity (d). Adam has 20 hours of capacity (e) this sprint.
   working days x d = e

Determine What Can be Completed in the Sprint

After we've determined capacity for the whole team, we know what we can get done and we are ready to change the State of our accepted work to Committed. Changing it to this state removes it from the backlog.

Information will begin to show up under Work Details on the right side of Sprint 1. There are three different colors and this is what they mean:

Note that the term Committed is specific to Scrum. For MSF for CMMI Process Improvement 6.0 and MSF for Agile Software Development 6.0, Active or Resolved are comparable to Committed.

1. Open a task in the current sprint. Assign the task to Adam Barr. Or, if you don't assign work to individuals, you can assign the activity.
   
2. Once all of your assignments are completed, you can look at the work in the way that makes the most sense for how you manage your projects. There's a view of the work by team member.
   
3. You can also look at the work by activity.
   
4. And, you can look at the total work to which the team has committed.
   

So, we've looked at how to create a sprint backlog, capacity planning, and have a good sense for how much work can be accomplished. In addition, we can look at work in several way: across the team, by individual, and even by activity type.