We have a team of around 10 developers working on a new product.
We have split this product into two team projects on Visual Studio Online. Developers can work on both projects during any one sprint. Although we have two team projects, the entire team works together as one agile unit.
Why did we do this?
We want separate product backlogs
Each project has their own Product Owner
But this has led to two problems:
We have two burn downs, which can make it difficult to track team progress.
We have to split individuals' capacity between two projects, which is not easy to do in Sprint Planning and also makes it difficult to track individual progress.
I feel like this may be a common problem. Does anyone have experience here? Any suggestions?
You should have both teams in the same team project. You c Dan create multiple teams that all exist within the same team project and get their own backlogs.
http://nakedalm.com/creating-nested-teams-visual-studio-alm/
Most of my customers have moved to a single team project and I have a simple rule:
"If you have assets that are related (with assets defined as code, people, or work items) then you should be in a single team project."
I just got done in London merging about 15 team projects into one so that the entire org can work together. This was 6 teams across about 12 products, all moved to one team project.
The only effective way to collaborate is within a single bucket of work.
Related
We are now starting development using Jira.
I currently have a team of 5 software engineers who can work on different projects and also on the same project a few times. What is the recommendation to use Jira? Do I create projects by "projects" or by team? How does the board formatting work in this case? When would you use an Epic?
I would like to understand cases of using Jira for you.
You should create a project per a project in your organisation, most likely it will reflect your organization structure. When it comes to the boards, you can display issues from several different projects on a single board so all members of your team can do a standup meeting without boards switching (Read more about boards here).
To the epics, consider creating an epic if you have a large user story that you want to split up into smaller chunks. You could also create an epic if you notice a pattern amongst several user stories you've created, and you want to bundle them into one group (you can read more here and here).
In our company there are a lot of projects that are connected by resources (people). So, people from one project works in onother one too. We are going to create Global Iteration (Iteration Path) that to assign items on it from different projects that to see all planned work in one common backlog.
But as far as I know it is not possible to do that for different projects.
Moreover, combining two projects is not a solution for me. Any ideas?
PS: I know the advantages and disadvantages of Single project (see topic) but it is not my case.
Currently, you can't show work items from multiple Team Projects on a single Kanban board in TFS.
As a workaround, you can either create your own query as #DaveShaw mentioned, or use one Team Project with multiple Teams and use features from Agile Portfolio Management. See https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/work/scale/portfolio-management
We have a five-member development team and will be building multiple internal projects in parallel. Upon researching, I find it is best to create one team project, even for our situation, correct?
If so, would you please recommend how to set up proper iterations for the projects and timelines?
TFS question - small team, multiple projects sounds similar to my situation, but I can't seem to get more than one "current" iteration in the TFS Agile process board.
Per team project you can have only one iteration tree (and therefore only one current iteration). You should decide based on how you plan your team resources. Do you want to have only a single backlog for the whole team or different backlogs for each project?
Each has its pros and cons, depending whether you want to use Visual Studio Team Service mainly for planning your team resources or planning your projects.
Using a single team project / backlog
With this approach it is easy to plan your whole team's resources for the next sprint. You can assign people to different tasks in different projects and have a good overview on what the team currently is working on. To assign work items to different projects you can use the area path.
Planning and tracking the progress of individual projects is a little bit harder with this approach since you have the same iteration structure for all projects and also only a common set of tags.
There are external tools which can integrate with Visual Studio Team Service available from the marketplace though, which can help you with planning individual projects.
Using a team project per project
With this approach you have a clear overview of the progress of each project and you can have individual iterations, tags, etc.
On the other hand it's harder to plan your team's resources since you won't have a single backlog and no place to see what your team is working on at the moment at a glance.
You can create one team project and set several child projects in it. With this, you can have the things configured for the whole project and also the child projects. Refer to this link for details: Multiple teams
I have two different projects within same Project Collection.
Is it possible to display the bugs of both the projects in same backlog or kanban board.
Currently, you cannot show work items from multiple Team Projects on a single Kanban board in TFS.
Kanban boards in TFS are currently associated with an Iteration Path. An iteration path only exists within the context of a Team Project. As such, Kanban boards by their current implementation live only within a Team Project.
As #Wouter stated, you could move the two projects into the same Team Project and use different iteration paths or area paths to differentiate your work items. This is actually a best practice. The name "Team Project" was actually a poor choice because they a Team Project isn't really mean to be the same as an actual development project. This has led to much confusion because it is not recommended to create a "Team Project" per actual project. It makes reporting and visualization a real problem.
Remembering that iteration paths are a hierarchical attribute, if you move both of the projects into the same Team Project, you can create an iteration path for each under the root and you can then get Kanban boards for each project. The root of the iteration path will also have a Kanban board and this board will be the rolled up board that shows all of the bugs from both projects on it.
I had this issue myself and found a solution when switched to Kanban Tool; simply by creating swimlanes on one Kanban board (one swimlane for each project) and then allowing bugs to be placed in the backlog and further development tasks in the next columns. So I have a complete view across many projects in one board. Happy to share my findings.
If you want to have information from different Team Projects, you can create your own query. By default, the queries limit their results to the current project but you can easily remove this clause. You will then get results returned from all projects you have access to. MSDN can help you get started with creating queries.
However, it sounds you are looking into having data from multiple teams roll up into a single project. This is supported by using one Team Project with multiple Teams beneath it and using features from Agile Portfolio Management. See MSDN: Agile Portfolio Management: Using TFS to support backlogs across multiple teams
"You could create a query for each collections"
OR
"Create a query like this and select the “Query across projects” checkbox to find all workitems in the current collection"
https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/122305/all-work-items-from-all-projects.html
We would like to use TFS2010
In my company, there is a single team working on multiple products at the same time. There is a visual studio solution for each product.
We can have the following scenarios:
Customer requirement 1 involves adding several features in product A and must be deliver in May
Customer requirement 2 involves adding several features in product A & B and must be deliver in Aug
Customer requirement 3 involves adding several features in product A & C and must be deliver in Aug
Customer requirement 4 involves adding several features in product B and must be deliver in Oct
Customer requirement 5 involves adding several features in product A & B and must be deliver in Oct
Developer Team is small (10 people) and can work on product a , b or c even though some developer know the product A better than the product B and so on.
In reality, we have almost 10 products. Sometimes we have hot fixes and I have to track all activities.
What do you recommend ? one or many team project ? if one team project, which structure do you recommend? Agile or CMMI templlate ?
The decision which project template to choose depends on you development process because the template represents it.
The CMMI template has a lot more fields for the workitem types (bug, task) than the agile one and is more formal. Take the time and think about your actual or future development process and take a look here to get an overview.
The scenarios you are decribing are reached via a branching strategy, take a look at the ALM Ranger branching guide
I would make one team project collection (because branching over team project collections is not possible).
I would create one team project and organize the products with the areas, iterations and team queries.
Reasons for my decicions
each team project gets its the version control and sharepoint site
you are a small team which work on all projects
the administrative overhead for each team project
Here you can find some good pictures and walkthroughs for working with one team project for different products.