Why Dates Matter

In Team Foundation Server (TFS), you use iterations as one way to classify work. Specifically, iterations represent named time boxes in your team project. However, there’s no facility in version 1.0 of TFS to associate explicit dates with an iteration. This can be good and bad. The good is you can reuse an iteration in a cyclical fashion, rotating work items from one iteration to another. A downside is that certain reports can have their data skewed by incorrect iteration dates. The report that first comes to mind is the Unplanned Work report.

Here’s the description for this report from the process guidance documentation:

How much unplanned work is there? This graph distinguishes the total work from the remaining work and charts it into planned and unplanned. Very few projects identify all of the work to be done ahead of time, even within the iteration. This may be perfectly acceptable, if you schedule a sufficient buffer for handling the load of unplanned work (for example, bugs). On the other hand, it may be a real problem if you have not scheduled the capacity and are forced to cut back on the planned work.

When you go to run this report, there are three date fields you need to enter: Start Date, Plan Completion Date, and End Date. In addition, you can filter by Area and Iteration. The key to getting an accurate report is to make sure that the dates are well known and agreed upon. Let’s say as the project manager, you run the report with the following dates:

Start Date: 12/1/2006

End Date: 12/31/2006

Plan Completion Date: 12/15/2006

This is how the report comes out.

Then let’s say someone from upper management runs the report with the same Start and End dates but a different Plan Completion Date of 12/24/2006.

Look what happened.

The total number of unplanned work items goes way down. When managing your project it’s important that from day one, everyone is on the same page when it comes to dates.

Speaking of dates, today is 7/7/7 which seemed like as good a day as any to kick this blog off. Hopefully, I'll have a bit more to say about VSTS going foward.