TFS on VisualStudio.com - how to utilize testing into the product backlog board

Question

Our team is using TFS hosted on VisualStudio.com, and are utilising the integrated Scrum tooling to manage our tasks and work.

So far so good! The Kanban board is particularly effective in keeping the team informed, and tracking the progress of the current sprint.

However - after the introduction of testing into our project, the testers have been raising bugs. As bugs appear in a very similar style to Product Backlog Items we have found that this makes the Kanban board very messy as it is difficult to differentiate between bugs and PBIs. If we have multiple bugs, and multiple PBIs in parallel (very likely scenario) this really detracts from the clean and useful presentation of the board. Even a filter would be handy, but I don't se any.

Has anyone any solutions to this problem? Are we using the Kanban board, or the TFS configuration in the correct manner?

Answer 1

Yes, this is how Bugs and PBIs are to be treated while using the Scrum process template. Bugs should be prioritized on the backlog as if they were PBIs. If you want Bugs to not exist on the backlog, thus removing them from the task board, you can remove them from the Requirements category. Here's a link on how to modify the categories.xml for a given project: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/dd273721.aspx