Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

• Use Microsoft Excel for bulk editing of work items.
Areas and Iterations
• Use areas for better traceability.
• Use iterations to represent milestones in your project.
• Create a separate iteration for unassigned scenarios and tasks.
• Determine appropriate iteration cycle duration.
Use Areas for Better Traceability
Use areas in your team project to keep project tasks, bugs, requirements, and other work
items organized. You can also set permissions on areas to restrict access to various parts
of your team project.
Use areas to represent logical or physical components, and then create sub-areas to
represent specific features. This structure helps you keep your work items organized and
can be used to improve traceability by component or feature.
To create areas for your project
1. In Team Explorer, click your team project.
2. On the Team menu, point to Team Project Settings, and then click Areas and
Iterations.
3. In the Areas and Iterations dialog box, click the Area tab.
4. Click the Add a child node toolbar button.
5. Right-click the new node, click Rename, and then type the area name you want.
6. Click the Area node.
7. Repeat steps 2, 3, and 4 to create additional areas and to create a hierarchy for your
project structure.
Beware of creating too complex area structure, while areas allow you to partition work
items permissions, there is overhead associated with managing those permissions for
complex trees. It may also be problematic to copy over the structure/ permissions to other
Team projects.
Additional Resources
• For more information about using areas, see “How To – Manage Projects in Visual
Studio Team Foundation Server” in this guide.
Use Iterations to Represent Milestones in Your Project
Use iterations to define how many times your team will repeat a particular set of major
activities (such as planning, implementation, or testing) during the course of application
development. This set of major activities should represent a milestone for the project with
a quantifiable outcome such as feature complete or component complete.
To create an iteration