How Microsoft DevDiv uses TFS - part 1

This and subsequent topics with this title are a translation of Gregg Boer's blog from the Microsoft Development Division, in which Gregg talks about using Team Foundation Server in the process of working on the Orcas project.

People often ask me: “How does Microsoft use TFS?”.
This series of publications will answer this question (at least partially) by guiding you through the processes of the Development Division that were used during the work on the Orcas project (Visual Studio 2008).
It is important to remember that everything I’m going to tell you about is based on the TFS version with the code name Whidbey.

Part 1 - The Process

Below is a picture showing our process. This process was used for all Orcas products, not just TFS.

• Scenario (Scenarios) - one or more correctly named business target. She describes the goals of the unit in this release.
• Value Props - the value of the product from the point of view of the consumer. It is formulated as “Why would a consumer want to pay for this work?”. All descriptions of values ​​were associated with scenarios.
• Experience (Experience) - what kind of experience should a consumer have in order to get a return on a product? You can treat this as a business level of use cases, or scenarios, or epic stories.
• Functionality (Feature) - a set of functions that we must implement to allow a given level of experience to create the required values ​​that meet the goals of the unit. Functionality defines the work.

In other words: Scenarios, Values ​​and Experience relate to product planning, in order to make sure that we are doing the right things. The fugktsional is related to work management.

Below is a rough estimate of each of the items we dealt with while working on Orcas.

In subsequent publications, I will show you how we managed each of these requirements.
Next post: team functioning model.