Software and UX

Summary

• Requirements;
• Unpacking;
• Customizing the configuration files;
• Installing the screen saver;
• Configuring the screen saver;
• Outlook security prompt;
• Running the screen saver;
• Free time calculation;
• Troubleshooting.

Requirements

• .NET Framework 4;
• Team Explorer 2010;
• Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010 (optional).

Unpacking

Simply unpack the .ZIP file into a directory of your choice. There is no special set up required, assuming you have the prerequisites already installed on the target machine.

Customizing the configuration files

The monitor comes preconfigured to point to the scrumsprintmonitor project at CodePlex. However, you probably want to see your own data up there. In order to get that running, you need to customize a couple of configuration files: SprintConfiguration.txt and team-info.xml. Please refer to the Configuration project wiki on how to do that. The screensaver configuration window provides help in editing these two files. They can reside on a network share, if you are running multiple monitor instances (as in a multi-site team). As soon as any configuration file change is detected, the monitor will refresh with the new data.

Installing the screen saver

Right click on the .SCR file, and choose Install. You should see something like this:

Configuring the screen saver

Note: It is required that you run Team Explorer to connect to the target TFS server at least once before you set up the connection in Scrum Sprint Monitor.

Click on the “Settings…” button in the Screen Saver Settings dialog. Alternatively, you can right click on the .SCR file and choose Configure. You are then presented with this configuration form:

For the TFS Server Name field, you need to specify the name of the server you want to connect to, either in the format of myservername, or https://myservername:443.

In the Team Members area, you can use the “Edit in Microsoft Excel 2007…” button to edit the file you already selected in the Configuration File text box above it. This is a considerable time saver when you have a lot of team members.

In the Outlook Integration area, you are able to turn on/off the integration with Microsoft Outlook in order to take into account people’s free/busy time. You are also able to configure how Tentative appointments should be handled.

Outlook security prompt

When you run the monitor with Outlook Integration turned on, you will be greeted periodically with the following dialog from Outlook:

Basically, Outlook is trying to time-limit external programs’ access to its data. You have two choices if you want to get rid of this periodic reminder: you can disable the warning in Outlook 2007/Tools/Trust Center/Programmatic Access, or you can use user bebo’s suggestion of using this software to change the way Outlook handles security warnings: http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/security.

Running the screen saver

It is recommended to set the wait time for the screensaver down to 1 minute.

After the screensaver starts running, you should see a gray background with the text “No Data Available Yet” displayed for a few seconds. It could take longer depending on the size of your team (it needs to pull data from Outlook and TFS).

Any error messages should show up in that screen. Should you get stuck with an error message, drop by at the Discussions area of the project at CodePlex, and ask the question there.

Free time calculation

There are a few things to keep in mind, in order to keep time estimates accurate:

• PTO: team members should add their PTO to their calendar and mark it as Busy, or Out-of-office.
• Holidays: team members should revise the holidays for the duration of the sprint, and mark them as either Busy, or Out-of-office. This is especially true in multi-site teams, in which team members can have different holidays.
• Sprint Planning, Sprint Retrospective and Sprint Review meetings: they should be scheduled into Outlook, so they can be taken into account by the monitor.

Troubleshooting

Outlook Integration relies on the Outlook 2003/2007 PIAs. Outlook setup will have had installed those on the target machine, if at the time there was a .NET Framework installed as well (Windows Vista ships with .NET Framework, Windows XP does not). In any case, you can go back to the Office Setup and reinstall the .NET Programmability Support for Outlook: