Tag: Scrum

Workflow State Categories: Why Your States Map the Way They Do

Dec 22, 2025 • 2 min read • Richard Hundhausen

Here's a question that stumps a lot of teams the first time they customize a process: how does Azure Boards know that "Committed" in Scrum and "Active" in Agile mean roughly the same thing? The agile …

Azure Boards Scrum Azure DevOps

Configuring Additional Teams in One Project

Dec 8, 2025 • 3 min read • Richard Hundhausen

When you create an Azure DevOps project, a single default team is created with the same name as the project. For single-team Scrum, you just add the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Developers to that …

Azure DevOps Scrum

A Naming Convention for Test Cases

Nov 17, 2025 • 2 min read • Richard Hundhausen

A single PBI with five acceptance criteria can produce five or more Test Case work items. Multiply that across a forecast of eight PBIs and you're staring at 40-some test cases in a Sprint. Without a …

Azure Test Plans Scrum Preferred Practice

Scrum Work Item Types, Decoded

Oct 30, 2025 • 3 min read • Richard Hundhausen

Azure DevOps offers more than a dozen work item types, but most don't relate to planning and managing work. In the Scrum process, the ones that actually matter for a Scrum Team are Product Backlog …

Azure Boards Scrum

Area Paths vs. Iteration Paths

Oct 17, 2025 • 3 min read • Richard Hundhausen

Two of the most useful organizing concepts in Azure Boards get confused all the time, and the confusion creates real mess in a backlog. Area paths and iteration paths sound similar and live near each …

Azure Boards Azure DevOps Scrum

ATDD vs. TDD

Oct 1, 2025 • 2 min read • Richard Hundhausen

ATDD can sometimes be confused with TDD. It's akin to confusing ADHD with ADD, but I digress. The two practices share a family resemblance, and people who've only heard of one tend to assume it covers …

Scrum Development Testing

Don't Create Tasks Before Sprint Planning

Sep 10, 2025 • 3 min read • Richard Hundhausen

It's a smell when I see tasks created and associated with a PBI before Sprint Planning. I run into it constantly, usually from well-meaning teams who think they're getting a head start. They're not. …

Scrum Azure Boards

Project Dashboards vs. Team Dashboards

Aug 26, 2025 • 3 min read • Richard Hundhausen

When you create a dashboard in Azure DevOps, you make a choice that's easy to breeze past: is this a project dashboard or a team dashboard? They look similar and they're built from the same widgets, …

Azure DevOps Scrum

ATDD on a Scrum Team, Concretely

Aug 6, 2025 • 2 min read • Richard Hundhausen

Starting work by creating failing tests can feel counterintuitive and weird. It also works. Test-driven development proves that every day. Acceptance test-driven development, or ATDD, takes the same …

Scrum Azure Test Plans Testing