Managing Epic with MSF Agile v5

Question

Hi,

Is there a way to manage Epics (User Stories that needs to be broken down because it is too large) with MSF Agile v5? I need to track requirements that are first specified at high level (and are fairly large) by the client. These requirements need to be broken down into smaller User Stories as their size should allow the team to realize each of them in a single sprint.

I suppose the new parent-child relationship could be used to establish a relationship between an epic (the parent user story) and the "detailed user stories" (the children). Is it a scenario supported out-of-the-box by MSF Agile? Will the reports be able to reflect the progression of the parent user story based on the progression of its child user stories?

I know it is possible to define custom relationship between Work Items.  Is it a sensible solution to fulfill my need? Again, what would be the impact on the reports?

Thanks,

David

Answer 1

Yes.  The reports are designed to respect parent-child relationships between User Stories so that you can create epics/themes using the User Story WIT.  The reports show the tree and roll up the data accordingly.  So if you have a Story (A) with 3 child Stories (B, C, D)... the report will show the relationship between these the stories and roll up the data from B, C, and D to Story A.

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Thanks, Aaron Bjork http://blogs.msdn.com/aaronbjork

Answer 2

That's good news!

Are the values of the Remaining and Completed fields of a Story automatically updated to the sum of its children Tasks when any of these are updated? As per your example, would User Story A have a Remaining value of 9 if Story B, C, and D each have a remaining of 3 (given Tasks A1/B1/C1, A2/B2/C2 and A3/B3/C3 each have a Remaining of 1)?

Thanks,

David