Wednesday, May 24, 2006

What I learned this past week

So I’m back in Seattle after traveling to Orlando for VSLive! and Washington D.C. for IRMA. I’ve also been visiting a customer where I’m helping them with a long term case study for VSTS and MSF. I’ve got a single takeaway from these engagements - work item type definition is hard - really HARD! Walking through a workflow, optimizing it and transcribing it in to a state model for encoding in to a Team Foundation Server work item type is hard. I need to think more about this and publish some guidance. For now here a brief description of how I do it…

(1) I start by asking the business owners to sketch the flow of work using stick figures and little stacks of work to be processed. I get them to map the flow with arrows between stations and activities for the stick figures scribbled on to a white board

(2) I then make a statechart model in Visio and create a state for each station in the flow - typically identified by a stick figure performing an activity. I then create a state for each queue in front of each station.

(3) I then map all the possible transitions between states. Remembering to think about return transitions. “Ooops, I didn’t mean to close that, I need to re-open it.”

(4) I then ask for all the reasons that each transition can happen. This activity usually flushes out a few missing transitions and even an occasional missing state. So I then rework steps 2 and 3 and complete the reasons

(5) I then transcribe the Visio statechart in to the WITD XML using an XML editor. It is a good idea to start with the WITDs that are shipped with MSF and edit them.

We’re not done at that point.

(6) Next we need to identify all the data fields required and a form layout for those fields. We need to decide which of the fields will be used in reports.

(7) Now using the XML editor we add these to the WITD file.

(8) Now we need to go through each transition and identify required fields that must be completed as a pre-requisite for that transition.

(9) Finally we edit the subtle aspects of the WITD file to include the required fields for specific transitions.

We’ll be posting some white papers on customization of MSF process templates very soon now and I will alert you when they are on-line. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF, Vistual+Studio