When to use Team Projects

Team Projects have turned out to a more confusing feature than was intended in Visual Studio Team System.  We are in the process of building some guidance for when to create them, but in the meantime, I thought I would shed some light on how we use them internally at Microsoft.

Team Projects were intended to represent the largest unit of work possible in your organization.  For us at Microsoft, that means a product or prodct line.  ‘Visual Studio 2005’ for example, is a product line that we represent with a single Team Project.

Visual Studio 2005 is made up of a number of products, features and technologies.  For example, ASP.NET, Team System and the Common Language Runtime are all part of the Visual Studio 2005 product line. 

To keep things organized, we use ‘Areas’ extensively in our single Team Project.  Permissions can be set on areas to restrict access to various parts of a given Team Project; I’ll do a video on this shortly.

Here is how are ‘Areas’ are laid out:

Dogfood_areas

‘Areas’ are used all the way down to the feature level; for example, the Team Foundation Server Version Control team uses an Area to define each SCM command:

Dogfood_areas2

‘Areas’ are something we’ll be talking a lot more about in upcoming presentations and documentation.  They are a really useful way of categorizing within a Team Project.  Hopefully showing you how we categorize things within our teams helps a bit.  More detailed guidance is on its way.

Thanks,

Eric.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2006
    PingBack from http://www.robherbst.com/blog/2006/08/10/team-foundation-server-project-guidance/
  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2006
    Nice info !!!I'll post some info related in my spanish blog !!! Keep the good work going on !!!Bye from SpainEl Bruno
  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2006
    ¿Querés saber cómo se organizan los proyectos del TFS de desarrollo de VS2005 en
  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2006
    After traveling most of June, and then some in July it’s been hard catching back up but almost...
  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2006
    Abhinaba on Team Build Ticker - Parting Gift.Brian Harry on TFS Trial Edition and Release Candidate...
  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2006
    One question that seems to come up in a discussion around TFS is what level in a software development project...
  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2006
    I gathered that projects had to be larger pieces of work as TFS only supports 400 in the lifetime of the server.Now for one TFS project I have many work projects. These have iterations and user stories. How do I manage these projects and provide reporting on each of these projects?
  • Anonymous
    September 02, 2006
    Buenas, desde hace unos días estamos manteniendo una conversación interesante dentro de los foros de
  • Anonymous
    September 25, 2006
    PingBack from http://bryanandnoel.hintonweb.com/blog/2006/08/10/using-team-projects-microsoft-style/
  • Anonymous
    September 29, 2006
    ¿Querés saber cómo se organizan los proyectos del TFS de desarrollo de VS2005 en
  • Anonymous
    September 30, 2006
    Buenas, desde hace unos días estamos manteniendo una conversación interesante dentro de
  • Anonymous
    January 30, 2007
    There’s not a huge amount of best practice info out there regarding areas and iterations. One interesting