I have been using the eScrum project template in Microsoft Visual Studio TFS edition for a few sprints now. Along the way, the team noticed some issues with the template. In TFS, by navigating to Team > Process Editor > Work Item Types > Open WIT from Server, I opened the eScrum Product Backlog Item template and made some changes.
Points
The Product Backlog Item template is missing a "points" field to indicate the relative size of a PBI. There is a Baseline Work field, but that is used to represent the number of hours for the PBI in reports. I decided to add a Points field where a dropdown shows Fibonacci based numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, 250, 500, ?, infinity). Since there are values such as "?" and "infinity, the field type must be 'String'. I could have used the Baseline Work field, but that allows people to enter values that could complicate things, such as entering 21 instead of 20. To avoid the debate, or having to correct this, I added an ALLOWEDVALUES rule to control this.
Query
Now I can create a query to allow me to see what items does the team need to estimate. By using the team's velocity, this query can include items that are larger than half a sprint, which indicates the team needs to work with the Product Owner to break this down into smaller PBIs.
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