In my previous post I talked about planning a whole project. Now I want to blog about planning a single iteration using the new Team System 2010 iteration with Excel and Project.

After creating the user stories, the next step is to break each user story into detailed tasks. To facilitate this, the MSF agile template has a special Excel sheet under Documents->Shared Documents->Iteration <X>:

Double-click to open it. Before you edit, click the Edit Workbook button beneath the ribbon:

To split up a user story into (linked) tasks, you want to create child work items beneath your user story. Do this using the “Add Child” button on the ribbon:

Pressing the Add Child will add another row to the sheet, and also adds another Title column. This is used to detect/indicate the parent/child relation between two work items.

So here I’ve added a couple of child tasks to the user story. Now we can start planning the iteration.

First you will want to fill in the “Assigned To”, “"Remaining Work”, “Area” and “Iteration” columns with some data. Choose a team member for the Assigned To column, and choose your iteration for the Iteration column. Here’s an example:

Next you want to plan the iteration, so go to the Settings tab. In this tab you set the iteration start and end date. The Excel sheet will use this together with the interruptions sheet to determine the amount of work that can be done in this iteration.

Once you fill out this sheet you can go to the Capacity sheet, where you can balance the work load for each team member. Start by providing the hours/day and number of days in the iteration for each team member. Now you can see the workload for each team member.

April has way too much work (and Abu too little) so go back to the backlog sheet and move some work to Abu. Go back to the capacity sheet and see the now work load:

Imagine Doris being called over to help with another project. How will this affect capacity? Start by filling in the interruptions tab:

And go back to capacity. Whew. Not a problem!