Tracking multiple teams in a single release

Question

Using the Microsoft Scrum template, can anyone suggest the best way of linking specific PBIs and tasks to a team in such a way that a team burndown can be created?

We've achieved this on our existing TFS 2008 system by customising item definitions in the EMC Scrum for Team System template to add a "Team" field. We could do the same again on our new TFS 2010 server, but I wondered if there were alternatives that may have advantages to template customisation. It must be a fairly common requirement.

Thanks,

Ian

Answer 1

Ian,

Have you used the TFS Power Tool? It's free VS addin and can be used to customize team project template. http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c255a1e4-04ba-4f68-8f4e-cd473d6b971f/

 

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Forrest Guo | MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 2

Hi Forrest, I've been using the process template editor, and will add a team property if that's what's needed. Just wanted to check if there was another, recommended, way of organising by team as I would have expected it to be a frequently encountered situation.

Thanks,

Ian

Answer 3

Ian, I don't think there're other ways to customize the process template. Officially, User Voice is the way to send ideas and feature request for Visual Studio J

 http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/category/30925-team-foundation-server

Best Regards,

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Forrest Guo | MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 4

In addition, we have TEAMS in the next version of TFS and in the TF service preview (tfspreview.com). You may want to look at using one of those. The forum for TFSA is http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/TFService/threads.

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Trevor Hancock (Microsoft)
Please remember to "Mark As Answer" the replies that help.

Answer 5

Hi Ian,

you could probably work with iteration paths to solve this. Something like this:

TeamProject
-Release1
--Sprint 1
---Team 1
---Team 2
--Sprint 2
---Team 1
---Team 2

or if you prefer this instead:

TeamProject
-Release 1
--Team 1
---Sprint 1
---Sprint 2
--Team 2
---Sprint 1
---Sprint 2

Getting a team burndown from TFS is then only a matter of selecting the correct iteration path filter for your burndown chart...

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Jesper Fernström
QWise Software engineering – refactored!

Answer 6

Our problem is we want a team to work on multiple releases in the same sprint.  So Iteration becomes:

Team 1

--Sprint 1

--Sprint 2

Team 2

--Sprint 1

--Sprint 2

Now our Iteration is no longer Release based, which seems to cause broken functionality ripples throughout the system.

We added a "Release" field to the work items, but Hierarchical queries don't work anymore.

I keep trying to convince my organization, that this isn't the way to solve this problem.  Instead each Team should be focused on a Release and Team members can be on multiple teams if they want them to work on multiple releases.

Not only that but our branching hierarchy is no longer represented by Iteration, making it more difficult to track merges of changeset / workitems in different releases.