I would like to know what is the concept of Team Project in TFS 2010. 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 are following SCRUM methodology. Our product back log and sprint back log basically comprises of items related to multiple products, so during the sprint the team works on backlog items relating to multiple products. We are looking forward to use SCRUM Process template for TFS 2010.
I was wondering what approach should i take in terms of organising the projects in TFS Source Control and making full use of the TFS Process Template(SCRUM)?
Should I create a Team project for each product? But that would mean I will have to maintain process template, product backlog and sprint backlog for each Team project. Especially when creating and querying work items, it will involve lot of switching between team projects in team explorer. Similarly, when creating burn down charts/reports, there is going to be one for each of the Team project. This seems like a nightmare!
Or should I create one Team project and put all the products(Visual Studio solutions) under it? This sounds better to me because, there will be one process template, one product and sprint backlog and one place to look at/query all work items.
To me it seems like Team project should map to a Team and not to a Product or Visual Studio Solution. However in my past experience, I have come across places where Team Project is mapped to product/visual studio solution and I am a bit confused.
The term "Team Project" is confusing. I really wish Microsoft had used a different phrase.
Having said that, I don't know what other word or phrase would apply.
A Team Project does not necessarily correspond to a Visual Studio project or solution
A Team Project certainly doesn't correspond to what SourceSafe used to call projects (those were just folders)
A Team Project doesn't necessarily correspond to a single source control tree. The people working on a Team Project may use code from multiple source control trees (assuming this can be mapped into your workspace correctly).
A Team Project more closely corresponds to an endeavor of some kind. This may or may not involve some source code. It will involve some people. It may or may not involve some work items, or builds, or reports, or portal sites, or lab environments, or any combination of those artifacts that are scoped on a per-team-project basis. These will usually be artifacts that will be useful to some "Team" in accomplishing their "endeavor" (which may just happen to ba a matter of producing and releasing some code, using the help of work items, reports, source control, builds, etc.)
I would advise you to create one team project and multiple folders for different solutions.
In other words leave your work as it is and create just one team project.When checking in products codes use server folders. This way you have a unique repository with shared work items and reports
Related
Our team has an a TFS project in which we keep all the teams work. Sometimes some from our team are involved in another project that has it's own TFS project. The tasks that the people from our team does on the other project are in their own area.
Is there a tool that would support synchronizing work items between projects and keep all fields the same value except Area and Iteration? Area would be statically mapped to some value and iteration would live it's own live in each project.
We use the same project template for all team projects.
There are a number of commercial tools, most notably TaskTop, to allow you to sync work items between projects. I have seen TaskTop work well in quite a few circumstances.
The TFS Integration Tool is a free tool provided by the TFS product team that can do synchronisation of work items.
What is the recommended organizational structure of team projects in TFS 2010? Let's say we have 4 big departments within our enterprise. Is the recommended approach to create a team project for each department or logical representation of one's organization and have different folders for VS projects within those TFS team projects? Or should each reasonable big project have their own team project?
I am asking more from a perspective of code storage and TFS artifacts. If we are to store both code and user stories, tasks, etc. in one big team project, does that hinder the agile development process? We can still setup separate queries and a separate dashboard for each "project" within the big team project. However, the builds would be in this giant list of builds.
If we had many smaller team projects, it would be more difficult for QA to span their work across multiple team projects. They'd need to know where to enter bugs - knowledge that we don't necessarily want to rely on.
So what is the best practice?
Storing everything in a single project will not hinder "the agile development process". My recommendation would be to create an area path for each project, and organize your work items under those area paths. You'll have a product backlog query for each area. Use the iteration path field to then drive a schedule across all the projects. That should work fine. All the reports can then be filtered by area and/or iteration.
For builds, I see many teams prefixing build definitions to provide better organization. Here's a blog post that describes an extension you can download to help better organize builds.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/04/01/build-folders.aspx
In our current project we have four different TFS2010 Team Projects in the same Team Project Collection. The reason for this is that different parts of the project wanted to use different team project templates (CMMI vs Agile).
All projects now use the same template. Therefore we have now reached the conclusion that it would be better to merge the projects into a single team project. This raises several questions:
Is it possible / feasible to use one of the existing projects as the target project for the other three?
How do we move our existing work items into the new project whilst maintaining our area tree? We hope to create one root area for each of our existing team projects, and move all work items / areas underneath this root node.
Today we have work item links from one team projects into another - how do we keep these links when merging?
What is the best practice when moving the source code? One clear approach is to simply copy it to the new location, and locking and keeping the old team projects in case we need to access older versions of the code. But is it feasible to use branching for this, e.g. branching all existing code to the new team project? What kind of problems might this approach cause?
Thanks for your help!
Unfortunately, TFS 2010 doesn't allow you to merge team projects.
Stucturing Team Projects and Team Project Collections is one of the most important strategy decisions to make before starting to use TFS. Unfortunately, a lot of the customers we help don't make the up-front planning necessary and don't understand some of the limitations in TFS around merging, moving, splitting, etc. team projects before they start diving in to using TFS :(
When we have consulting engagements where customers want to consolidate their team projects, we end up having to do a lot of manual work to migrate the artifacts. We have built some tools to help us with this process for work items but for the most part it's a lot of tedious consulting work. The migration utilities always end up needing to be customized for each customer as well since they usually have different business rules for how they want to migrate.
Ultimately, a "migration" doesn't end up bringing over all of the information and you end up with some other problems like date/time stamps being different from what they were originally. (I have heard it referred to as a time compression issue with migrations.)
Some additional thoughts for each of your original questions:
Sure, you could theoretically use one of the existing team projects as the target for the migration of the other three. As long as you like the team project name and don't want to rename the team project. :)
This is where we have built custom work item migration utilities to assist our consulting customers. You would likely need to do the same.
This is possible as well with a custom work item migration utility. You can just keep track of the mappings between old work item IDs and new work item IDs and then add the links later once all of the new work items are created in the target team project.
That's ultimately up to you. I would do a "move" version control operation on the source code from the old team project to the new team project. This maintains everything. However, I would not delete any of the old team projects because that will cause the version control history to be destroyed as well.
It's not the best story for you but hopefully it will help your planning out some!
We have a project that will be developed in multiple phases over the next 12- 18 months. It's an agile-esque project in a waterfall environment, it that matters.
My initial thought was to create one team project named 'Project X'. Under Project X could be multiple solution folders but the main development would be in a folder called Main. Branching would be done as appropriate.
The other solution folders under the Project X team project would be for some of the tools we need to build for this project that are independ of the main app, which is a web app. For example, we needed to build an app for processing data and sending it to a web service but it never interacted or merged in any way with the main web app.
The advantages I see to this approach are a) all the code for the project is kept under a single team project and b) all the work items, bugs, wishlist items, are accessible from all the other projects.
Does this approach make sense? Any ideas to improve this? I haven't created the team project yet.
I will simply comment on the advantages you listed to help you understand why this approach isn't ideal.
The advantages I see to this approach
are a) all the code for the project is
kept under a single team project and
Both your tools and your web application are for "This project." That right there is a key indicator that you should use one Team Project inside of TFS. You gain nothing by having two separate Team Projects. In fact, you may make it more difficult to manage.
Consider if you have a requirement that has work one both a tool and the main application to complete. In your scenario, there would be no way to track work history associated to one requirement because you are using two Team Projects. There are many more reasons, you have to manage permissions in two places, have two sets of mappings etc etc.
I would highly recommend you opt to use one Team Project. You, and your entire team, will thank me later.
b) all the work items, bugs, wishlist
items, are accessible from all the
other projects
If you have two Team Projects, you cannot access WIs etc across the projects. In fact, you will have the exact opposite- you will have to create the WIs in both projects if the work crossed over between the two.
You should have one Team Project. A folder for the tools and a folder for the web application. From there you can take it further having it branched off- a branch for development and a branch for main is a good start. Inside each, have the tools and web application so the versions stay in sync.
Here is a good place to start reading before setting up your project: Microsoft Team Foundation Server Branching Guidance.
What you're describing is not a Team Project. You're simply describing the structure of some source control folders in TFS.
A Team Project is a lot more than just source control. From T (Visual Studio ALM Glossary):
team project
The named collection of work items,
code, tests, work products, metrics,
and so forth, used by a defined team
with Visual Studio Team Foundation to
track a common set of related work.
We're starting to user Team Foundation Server and my boss would like some way to "archive" projects. Meaning after they are completed, remove them from an "active" state so that only "active" projects are visible.
Does anyone have any experience with this?
I've thought of 2 options.
1) Create 2 base projects. 1 for active projects and 1 for achived projects
2) Remove all users from the archived projects.
Thanks,
Sam
I would personally recommend waiting for TFS 2010 when more functionality will be introduced that will assist you in the ability to "archive" Team Projects.
In TFS 2010 you will hopefully be able to move a team project to a new Team Project Collection. Actually you do this by duplicating your "active" project collection and then deleting all the team projects from it apart from the one that you want archived. In this active project collection, delete the archived project that you have a copy of in the duplicated project collection. This archived team project will then live in it's own project collection which means it has it's own database etc which can be easily backed up / archived etc.
The archived team project project collection can then be left as it is as it doesn't slow down the server any if not being used - or it could even be detached from the TFS Application instance so that it doesn't show up at all and re-attached at any time.
An advantage of using project collections in TFS 2010 is that full Version Control and Work Item Tracking history will be maintained.
I would use it just as you normally do, but when you are done with the project then you remove it from the visible list. (In Visual Studio you can right click on a project in the team explorer and say remove.)
If you are worried about changes after the project is done, then remove the users from the contributors list. If you really want to boot the users out (so they cannot even see it) then you can deny them rights to the project.
This way you don't have to see it, but you can keep all your projects on the base level.
I would NOT recommend having just 2 base project for active and in-active. A TFS project should not be based on a state.
We created an "Archive" team project and we regularly move unused source code to that team project. It has worked out well for us, the history is preserved so we can always reference the archive project for old code or information on past changes. We also limit access such that developers have read access but only TFS administrators have write access. I haven't checked to see how these moves impact the association of check-ins with work items - mostly because everything we archived was checked in before we moved to TFS.
As for the one active team project, I was led to believe by knowledge experts and online documentation that this wasn't the best way to organize team projects. I think ideally you group projects/solutions together into a single team project if they are related (i.e. by line of business or dependencies).
I'm sure you've already done your research, but there is plenty of documentation out there that might assist (especially if your team maintains a single application or a handful of applications). I would suggest starting with patterns & practices: Team Development with TFS.