TFS 2015 Iteration Organization for Multiple Products

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Our development team is upgrading to TFS 2015 and we're able to start our Work item tracking from scratch, so I'm looking to take advantage of this to re-organize some of our current processes.

However I can't figure out a logical way to organize the iterations across multiple products, here's some background on what we do today

    - We have 1 small team with 3 developers, and we all work on 3 different products concurrently, desktop, web, and mobile are the 3 products and they're all closely related owned by the same client
    - I have TFS setup as 1 large team project as I've read this is the best way to organize work rather than separate team projects
    - Each product has a different build number so we can identify different release versions for each product

Things I've tried for iteration organizing:

    - Iteration number for each product (desktop/build1.1 mobile/build3.1 web/build4.1) This doesn't work because I can only set one of these as the 'Current' but in reality we're working on all 3 of these at the same time
    - Single iteration number (root/build1.1) this also doesn't make sense logically for us because 1.1 only applies to one of the products, when I create a build for the products they will have different build numbers that won't match TFS. Also not all 3 products are released every time, so even if I used a single release number for all 3, there'd be gaps in the release version numbers for the products that weren't updated in the current release
    - Child iterations, I can put mobile/build3.1 as a child of desktop/build1.1 for example, but it doesn't display this way under 'Current' so we wouldn't visually see that the current release will include mobile3.1 items also
    - I've read that we can create separate teams for each product, but then we would have to switch dashboards to see the current build for each product. This also feels strange since it's just the same 3 people working on multiple products

My goal is to for us to be able to see each different product release number that has current items assigned to it in 1 single place, can anyone suggest a way to organize this?

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tfsscrumtfs-2015backlog

1 Answers

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I don't feel that Iteration Path is the way to go here, nor is multiple teams. Use Iteration Path to track your team's sprints and keep to a single team as you are a small team as it is.

There was a Similar question a few days ago which was well answered by Jesse Houwing.

Tags may be the simplest way to go but you might find creating a custom Work Item type (Release) that you can link to the Backlog Items is better or perhaps just a custom field on the PBIs.