Agile Storyboards and TFS2011 Preview

In an earlier post I talked about agile, and how we can manage stories and tasks by using a storyboard.  If everyone is keeping the board up to date, you can glance at the board and see the state of the project.  You can see who's working on what, what's done, and whats left to do.

But what if the project is being managed across more than one site?  And isn't maintaining a board, and what's in TFS a complete pain in the arse?

This is where a new feature of TFS2011 comes in.  A virtual storyboard.  In the web version, under 'WORK', click on 'board', and you get a list of all the stories and tasks in your project:

I can drag and drop my story in to the Active column...

That's brilliant.  Previously, we had to go into TFS, go in to the task and manually edit the task.  Now I just have to drag and drop it.  Easy!  I can check it in TFS - it's definitely updated my task...

As you can see, it hasn't set my Story to 'Active', but it's fairly easy to click the Story title and update it manually in the browser:

Love it!