VSO and multiple projects for a single product team

Question

We have a team of around 10 developers working on a new product.

We have split this product into two team projects on Visual Studio Online. Developers can work on both projects during any one sprint. Although we have two team projects, the entire team works together as one agile unit.

Why did we do this?

• We want separate product backlogs
• Each project has their own Product Owner

But this has led to two problems:

• We have two burn downs, which can make it difficult to track team progress.
• We have to split individuals' capacity between two projects, which is not easy to do in Sprint Planning and also makes it difficult to track individual progress.

I feel like this may be a common problem. Does anyone have experience here? Any suggestions?

Farmann

Answer 1

You should have both teams in the same team project. You c Dan create multiple teams that all exist within the same team project and get their own backlogs.

http://nakedalm.com/creating-nested-teams-visual-studio-alm/

Most of my customers have moved to a single team project and I have a simple rule:

"If you have assets that are related (with assets defined as code, people, or work items) then you should be in a single team project."

I just got done in London merging about 15 team projects into one so that the entire org can work together. This was 6 teams across about 12 products, all moved to one team project.

The only effective way to collaborate is within a single bucket of work.

Aboulia

I was playing around with this now - works great!! But this would mean having only one source control repository? Perhaps using just folders and workspaces to split up the project code? – Farmann

Correct -- you can assign security permissions at the folder level for the teams. Or (although this is a major change that should not be undertaken lightly) you can use Git and set up multiple repositories, one repo per application, then set repo-level security. – Hangeron

Thanks! I have asked another related question here. – Farmann