TFS: Scrum for Team System Track Actual Worked Hours

DylanSmith had an interesting forum comment on the SFTS website

He tracks actual time using the SFTS template through appropriate use of the Estimated Effort and Work Remaining fields.  The idea is that if you want to enter X hours of actual time against a SBI you have to decrease the Work Remaining by Y and/or increase the Estimated Effort by Z such that Y+Z == X.

For example, lets say I had an SBI with an Estimated Effort (EE) of 5 hours, and a Work Remaining (WR) of 5 hours.

Day 1: Actual time spent on SBI is 3 hours.  Change WR to 2.  (Y = 3, Z = 0, Y+Z = 3).

Day 2: Actual time spent on SBI is 3 more hours, and I’m still not complete, probably about 1.5 hours remaining still on this SBI.  Change WR to 1.5, Change EE to 7.5 (Y = 0.5, Z = 2.5, Y+Z = 3).

Using this method I can report on actual time, it is simply EE – WR.

TFS: Scrum for team system, why some reports don’t seem to work.

from the SfTS website:

Here are some standard reasons why the reports do not appear to work:

• Warehouse Syncronisation
  The Scrum for Team System reports are generated by SQL Reporting server which uses the TFS warehouse database as it’s data source. By default, the warehouse database is only updated with the work item tracking data every hour. This means that it will take at least an hour before changes made to work items are reflected in the reports.

• Overnight Update
  Some reports plot lines using the delta between days, so no data will be visible until the following day.

• No Sprint Data
  Sprints must have a start and end date before they can be viewed in reports.