CODEWITHSUNDEEP
tfs
meyousikmann
meyousikmann

Reputation: 163

TFS 2012 Product Backlog ordering by feature

I currently have one Product Backlog and two different teams, one local and one in India, that work on user stories from the common Product Backlog but run on different sprint schedules. My team setup looks like this:

Product: MyProduct
Teams: Team1, Team2

My Product Backlog is "owned" by several different Product Owners, each with their own different area of the backlog that will implement a certain feature and each with their own ordering. So each individual feature group needs to be ordered by its respective Product Owner. My feature groups looks like this:

Product: MyProduct
Features: Feature1, Feature2, Feature3, Feature4, Feature5...FeatureN

Finally, I have a Product Manager that oversees the entire Product Backlog (and thus, the feature group Product Owners) and wants to make macro level ordering decisions regardless of feature group or team.

I realize the best approach would be to simply have the Product Manager play the role of Product Owner and facilitate the ordering process through the different feature owners so that I am left with one backlog and two teams. Unfortunately, I am not in a position to make that change at this time. What I would like to know is if there is a way to setup TFS to support my current situation.

My requirement is that my feature groups should be able to order their PBIs individually, that order should roll-up to the master backlog, and my two development teams should be able to pull their work from there.

I have tried setting up two teams and used Tags to categorize the backlog so that my feature groups can filter the backlog and see only their PBIs. This works great in most respects except for the ordering of PBIs. Once the backlog is filtered for a feature group, the click and drag functionality to re-order is lost. The only way to re-order PBIs once a filter is applied is to manually edit the Backlog Priority field. This is cumbersome at best because you can't really re-order PBIs like this. If I decide I want to move a PBI from 15 to 4, I can edit the Backlog Priority field of the PBI from 15 to 4, but the rest of the PBIs do not shift to account for this so I essentially end up with two 4s. Obviously this is not ideal.

I then tried to create a separate team for each feature group. This solves my re-ordering problem but now I don't get an overall picture of my two teams because I have created a team for each feature group. Additionally, with each new feature dreamed up by my product team I need to create a completely new team.

Can anyone suggest a way to configure TFS so that it will give me subsets of my Product Backlog that can be easily ordered and rolled-up to the master backlog, but still operate with only two teams defined?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1585

Answers (1)

jessehouwing
jessehouwing

Reputation: 114721

In TFS you can associate an Area to a team. When you stick the overall owner into it's own team and assign the root as his default area, then you can have your development teams each use a child or children of that. You can then assign one or more features (which would be an area node) to a team to put the pbi's in their backlog view.

That way your product backlog should be orderable.

Upvotes: 1

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