Agile Development Practice: Scrum Management with TFS Electronic Kanban Board

In response to the Center’s push for agile development, the Fifth Development Division explored and practiced agile management and R&D, collaborating with the Project Office to implement Scrum management for both project and routine tasks using TFS electronic Kanban boards, successfully piloting daily stand‑ups in several project teams.

The division held the "Five Types, Five Showcases: Agile R&D in Practice – Scrum Agile Management with TFS Electronic Kanban" event, attended by the division director, chief engineer, functional team leaders, and technical staff.

During the event, the Credit Control Group leader introduced the concept of agile management, emphasizing short‑term clear goals, timely communication, and lightweight iterative sprints, contrasting it with traditional top‑down, long‑term planning.

Following the discussion, the Credit Control Group shared their two‑month experience of agile management based on TFS.

Work Item Management

After multiple consultations with the Project Office, four hierarchical levels for TFS work items were defined, bringing all tasks under TFS control.

Personnel Management

Teams are organized by functional groups and also include cross‑functional management, production, and product demand teams to handle different work types.

Time Management

Work cycles combine fixed and special periods: regular work follows a two‑week iteration, while production work aligns with release windows.

Scrum Practice

Four core activities are executed each iteration: iteration planning meetings, daily stand‑ups, topic discussions, and iteration retrospectives.

The session concluded with a live demonstration of using the TFS electronic board for daily stand‑ups based on the Credit Control Group’s last iteration.

During the discussion, participants raised valuable questions about task granularity, conflicts between existing waterfall processes and agile, and optimal stand‑up size and duration, offering constructive suggestions.

Division head Zhao summarized the activity, praising the TFS‑based Scrum agile management model, especially the electronic board’s statistical, traceable, and user‑friendly features, and outlined several goals:

Enhance communication to resolve information and skill asymmetries, boosting team efficiency and quality.

Use short‑cycle reviews for continuous risk control throughout development rather than relying on post‑release fixes.

Provide objective, timely results to accumulate data, quantify performance, and ensure fair team incentives.

Agile R&D aims not to increase workload but to enable smoother, more relaxed project management through scientific methods.

Agile R&D Work Requirements

From the business demand side: Explore ways to match business requirements with functional tasks, achieving fully traceable and trackable demand processes.

From the product development and release side: Leverage tools like TFS to link work items with configuration management, CI, automated testing, and version release, creating an end‑to‑end automated workflow that frees human effort, controls release risk, and improves efficiency and quality.

We are already on the road to practicing agile R&D.