TFS setup for one small team and multiple parallel projects

Question

We have a five-member development team and will be building multiple internal projects in parallel. Upon researching, I find it is best to create one team project, even for our situation, correct?

If so, would you please recommend how to set up proper iterations for the projects and timelines?

TFS question - small team, multiple projects sounds similar to my situation, but I can't seem to get more than one "current" iteration in the TFS Agile process board.

Answer 1

Per team project you can have only one iteration tree (and therefore only one current iteration). You should decide based on how you plan your team resources. Do you want to have only a single backlog for the whole team or different backlogs for each project?

Each has its pros and cons, depending whether you want to use Visual Studio Team Service mainly for planning your team resources or planning your projects.

Using a single team project / backlog

With this approach it is easy to plan your whole team's resources for the next sprint. You can assign people to different tasks in different projects and have a good overview on what the team currently is working on. To assign work items to different projects you can use the area path.

Planning and tracking the progress of individual projects is a little bit harder with this approach since you have the same iteration structure for all projects and also only a common set of tags.

There are external tools which can integrate with Visual Studio Team Service available from the marketplace though, which can help you with planning individual projects.

Using a team project per project

With this approach you have a clear overview of the progress of each project and you can have individual iterations, tags, etc.

On the other hand it's harder to plan your team's resources since you won't have a single backlog and no place to see what your team is working on at the moment at a glance.