How can we work on multiple sprints at the same time if we only have one team?

Question

We have a small group < 4 but work on several different applications that we support. Each application gets its own Git repo, but as for managing the effort I really don't want to setup a separate team as well for each product.

Questions:
- For a small group working on several different products (eg. websites, services, utilities etc), can a single "team" within one project allow us to work on 2 sprints at the same time that are within different area paths?
- If I have already defined multiple teams, can I migrate all the content into the backlog of a single team?
- Assuming one team and multiple area paths, the project "hierarchy" would look something like this, correct?

Project
  |__Team
      Area-1
      |__Sprint 1-n
      Area-2
      |__Sprint 1-n
      Area-3
      |__Sprint 1-n

[ update ]
On further inspection looking at the docs, the iterations can have their own paths.
It seems that if we want to manage 2 or more simultaneous sprints or overlapping sprints that involve different products, it makes sense to go ahead and configure a team per product or possibly one team per "business area" (eg. Sales, Operations, Warehouse etc). Within a business area, our group would only have 1 active sprint at a time, which seems straightforward, compared to trying to manage multiple sprints within the same team. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/settings/set-iteration-paths-sprints?view=azure-devops

So the better approach might be multiple teams, with one (default) area per team and a iteration list for each team.

Matt Matt · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-19T16:32:53

The Team's areas and the Team's iterations are disjointed. I would think you could assign the different product areas (websites, services, utilities) to the team but then have just a single iteration list instead without trying to segregate the iterations by area. This won't work if the sprint dates for the different areas are different, but if they are different I don't think any approach you try to leverage in app will work.

Areas:

Sandbox
|__Team
   |___Websites
   |___Services
   |___Utilities

Iterations:

Sandbox
|__Sprint 1
|__Sprint 2
|__Sprint 3

I don't think you will get to a good solution if the different product areas have different start/end dates for the sprint even if you could make something workable using the tool.

How can we work on multiple sprints at the same time if we only have one team?

1 Answers