"By Design" in TFS2012 Update 1 only leaf node PBIs are shown in all Scrum Workflow views other than the Product Backlog.

However this behaviour causes PBIs to become "lost", if a non-leaf PBI is committed to a release it simply disappears from all views in the workflow except manually defined workitem queries.

Moreover the "Create Backlog Query" option is now inconsistent with the view since the resulting query does still include the hidden non-leaf PBIs.

I believe the most generally useful behaviour would be to not hide the non-leaf PBIs and have the views work with hierarchical PBIs as they are currently documented to at http://tfs.visualstudio.com/en-us/learn/collaborate/view-your-kanban-board/

Thanks

I work for a Professional Services organization and we write software for many (hundreds) of customers. We also may work on many projects per customer over time.

The first major issue for us when moving to TFS was how to structure Team Projects as, over time, we will have hundreds, or even thousands, of projects. Projects can vary from being a few days work to spanning multiple years.

I would have liked an easy way to create a container for team projects (i.e. customer) and then create team projects under this container. Perhaps we could have set a default process template for the container and then had the option to override it at the child level if necessary.

We ended up using a Team Project per customer and then just using source code folders and areas and iterations to manage projects for a customer. It didn't feel right but it seemed the best approach from a security and TFS administrative management perspective. It also means we have to use the same process template for all projects for a given customer which isn't always what we want.

I would like to see more thought given to Team Project structure to better support consulting companies who deal with hundreds of customers and projects.

On, what is now known as , tfspreview while entering information about bugs, tasks and so forth - you would have instant access to chat to talk to other people working on the project. In this case other project admins would be awesome because you wouldn't have to call/email them to find out if they are about to enter a certain task/information or what they are working on in general.

Also this would provide an opportunity for people entering tasks to ask other people closer to a certain specialised area about task effort and scope.

Visual studio would also have a chat feature within it.

This could also be taken to the next level where you could do code reviews with a video conference by having all that are involved invited

In TFS 2012, many of the new features such as the kanban diagrams and agile planning are only available for users with Visual Studio Premium.

Users that are licensed only with a TFS CAL (without Visual Studio), cannot use these features as there is no ability to purchase a standalone "premium" TFS CAL.

This creates a major problem when justifying TFS to upper management - it makes absolutely no sense to license project managers and non-technical staff members with full copies of Visual Studio to access basic planning functionality.

Contractor (offsite) licensing for TFS is similarly complex - it's currently holding up a major TFS rollout at my company (12,000+ employees). Licensing ****.

From what I can see, TFS backup facilities backup projects in the TFS database format. Sometimes backups are needed to last longer than the database format is supported.

If we were able to make backups using plain files, we could return to them many years later regardless of the current version of TFS being used, the current version of the database being used, etc.. No conversions would be necessary.

I understand that this can be manually done by doing a getting a read-only and making a copy, but it would be far better for this to be made part of a normal backup process (without needing to maintain a library of custom-developed scripts).