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TFS for cross team and cross business line work item tracking

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I was asked by current customer to come up with a solution, within TFS, to allow an entire division to work together in delivering software for a bank. This divisions made up of over 10 teams than work on many pieces of software. Some have simple requirements while others require harsh security and compliance. This is a standard problem and not unique to this company, however the perception still prevails with both TFS users and administrators, that one must have a single Team Project for each [Project | Team | Product] under way. This perception is not only incorrect but Team Foundation Server was designed to be used differently. The Developer Division (DevDiv) at Microsoft, who built the product, uses a single 20+ terabyte Team Project for their Work Items, Source Code and Builds for over 2k people. Team Foundation Server was designed and built to be used with fewer large Team Projects rather than many small Team Projects.

The group I am working with has many Team Projects, in many cases one for each application. The teams working against these Team Project generally own more than one application and they are running into a number of issues:

These issues are only those that have been presented by the teams using TFS and they have come up with a number of requirements to help facilitate the building of a solution suitable for their business line and potentially the others within the customer:

Note: There are a few asks for the ability to assign work to anyone within the organisation, but short of creating a single Team Project for the entire organisation (tens of offices from Singapore to London to New York.) This is just not feasible from a support perspective, especially backup/restore.

There are two separate but related things that should be implemented to both mitigate the issues above and to support the requirements describes. These are to move everyone within the division to a single Team Project and to implement Team Field within that team project.

A general rule of thumb: If there are shared resources (with resources defined as People, Work Items, or Source Code) then one should be in a single Team Project.

Single Team Project

The first solution is to create a larger Team Project that contains many Application as well as Teams. In Team Foundation Server 2012 we can create multiple ‘Teams’ within a single Team Project to compartmentalize the work. As the ‘Team’ entity is built upon the security principles we can also use this to secure our application code and work items to one or more ‘Teams’.

TFS for cross team and cross business line work item tracking

Figure: Using area path to represent products in Team Foundation Server

As there is a single Version Control repository in TFS for all Team Projects there is little change to the existing multiple Team Project functionality and we can use Area Paths mirrored with Source Control folders to identify Applications within the system.

As Area Path is a Dimension within the data Warehouse and cube we can using it to slice our data and report by application. As it is a tree we can also select which data from the tree to include and what to exclude. This is available as both published reports in Reporting Services and ad-hoc reports in Excel.

Team Field

By default Team Foundation Server provides two dimensions for categorising work and representing it on backlogs. Iteration Path, which is for the teams cadence, and Area Path that is for categorizing work. For this division we need an additional dimension and this can be provided with Team Field.

TFS for cross team and cross business line work item tracking

Figure: Using team field as a third dimension in Team Foundation Server

Team Field adds the ability to have a separate list for team and frees up Area Path, used for Team by default, for a much-needed Product breakdown as described above.

TFS for cross team and cross business line work item tracking

Figure: Using team field to represent teams in Team Foundation Server

With Team Field in use to designate which ‘backlog’ items appear on we can create both a single team that owns many Applications and have multiple teams that own a single application. In addition if we want to create a roll up to a Product Owner that perhaps has many teams that work on one or more applications we can also represent that.

TFS for cross team and cross business line work item tracking

Figure: Using team field to create virtual team groupings

This can be used to create many levels however it does become a management nightmare the more levels that are added.

Conclusion

All of the requirements of the customer will fulfilled with these solutions along with the use of reporting. There has been some concern about viewing data across Team Project and indeed across Collection if there is one collection per business line (we currently have 12 collections). However these fears are unfounded as all of the data from all of the collections ends up in a single data warehouse and cube. This will allow us to report across all of the business lines with ease.

Things are not all good and there are a few caveats to this approach:

These issues however are small in comparison to the benefits that are gained by the single Team Project and Team Field approaches detailed above.

How have you solved your organisational requirements in Team Foundation Server?

tools-and-techniques blog team-field tfs tfs-2013

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