Monday, September 24, 2012

TFS 2012 - Groups Reviewed

When the company I work at first started using TFS 2005 we decided to have only one Team Project due to the limit of ~250 Team Projects. Today our root source folder for our main Team Project has a few hundred folders (clients) in it, so do our areas and iteration trees.  While it is a bit annoying to maintain, I am certainly thankful of that decision when it comes to upgrading versions of TFS.

So understandably when I heard about the new Team concept in TFS 2012 I got rather excited.  After playing with Teams for a little while in 2012 they are nice, but don't help with management as much as I was hoping for.

Things I think should be tweaked

  • Work Items - "Assigned To Me" should filter by current team
  • When creating an alert in a team, I should be able to filter work items by my team iteration or areas rather than selecting it manually
  • Alerts that can be reused between teams (Email all team members when a work item is created in an area their team is associated to)
  • Iteration/Area tree views in the admin section should default to filtered to the default area/iteration and what is below it
  • Source view should select the first team favourite
  • Builds should filter queued/completed by team favourites
  • Easier way to assign security to areas based on groups (eg if a group is assocated to an area then allow the group a particular access level)
  • Allow personal favourites per team
  • At least some level of integration with reports
  • Way to change the path of the area that is automatically created for a team
Obviously the extended view is required to setup favourites in the first place, but this can be a toggle on all views.  Nothing major, i just feel that it might be nice to restrict my default view a bit more when I'm meant to be looking at a team.

Maybe i'll look into the plugin framework a bit more and see what I can do.