Datasheet

Approaches to Project Management
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Product owner — The product owner is responsible for all aspects of product defi nition.
This person is the voice of the customer and is always available to meet directly with the
development team to discuss and review features. There must be at least one product owner
on a project at all times.
Team members — Team members are responsible for building the product. They may
follow Agile engineering methods (such as test - driven development or paired programming),
although this isn ’ t a requirement. Team members are the architects, developers, and testers.
There is no outside group performing these tasks.
ScrumMaster — The ScrumMaster is responsible for the cadence and productivity of the
project team. The ScrumMaster defi nes the sprint duration (generally two to four weeks),
runs the daily stand up meeting, and helps to keep all team members working productively.
Chapter 2 covers team organization in detail.
Ceremonies
At the beginning of each sprint, the team holds a sprint planning meeting to review the backlog and
estimate how much it can accomplish. The team identifi es the items it will build in the sprint, and it
commits to completing those items. Because each sprint has a fi xed set of resources, the number of
features must vary (refer to Figure 1 - 4).
Each day of the sprint, the ScrumMaster leads the daily Scrum, or stand up meeting. This is a
short (15 - to 30 - minute) meeting to ensure that everyone on the team is productive and to identify
dependences that are impeding progress.
At the beginning of each sprint, the team holds a retrospective in which it looks back and discusses
what went well and what didn ’ t, in an attempt to improve productivity. Chapter 10 covers using TFS
to conduct effective retrospective meetings.
Microsoft Solutions Framework
MSF is a framework for building and shipping software in an iterative series of releases. Microsoft
Consulting Services developed MSF, based on best practices from Microsoft product teams. Its goal
is to help a team build and ship software for enterprise customers in a rapidly changing world while
reducing risk at each stage. It assumes that there will be changes in scope, technology, and people
throughout the project.
Iterative software development focuses on delivering small pieces of functionality frequently in order
to solicit and react to feedback, thereby reducing risk. Rather than shipping one release over a two -
year project, MSF breaks a release into four smaller projects, each of which delivers a subset of the
features. With this method, the end user can see the product in an earlier stage of development and
provide feedback before additional features are built.
The MSF Process Model
MSF uses a well - published process model, shown in Figure 1 - 6. MSF contains fi ve distinct
milestones in each iteration, represented in the fi gure by black diamonds and labeled outside the
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