Product Backlog in TFS

Despite us using scrum as a development guidance, we still use the TFS MSF For Agile 4 Template. But, we've done some adjustments to support scrum but most important: our process.

Our product backlog is a query which fetches all work items of the types Scenario and Bug. It includes the fields type, title, Sprint (Iteration path), Importance and Magnitude (estimate).

The scenario work item type has been adjusted to meet our needs: we've included a How to demo field for the product owner to inform how the scenario is to be demonstrated.

The bug work item has also been adjusted and we've included the importance field to make it possible to have on the product backlog.

What is important to us is to keep track of which bugs are related to which scenarios: this is most commonly accomplished by linking bugs to scenarios. A bug should be linked to a scenario when the bug hinders someone to demo the scenario as described. A bug that hinders a scenario from being accomplished is also given the same Importance to the linked scenario.

Another importance change we did was using our own Importance field instead of the MSF For Agile 4 field Rank. Rank is a string field for some strange reason, which meant the backlog was not sortable by number.