From ten days ago at TechEd, Brian Harry, Team Foundation Server Product Unit Manager, announced Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 and many of the Application Lifecycle Management features that they include. Some of those features are enabled on Team Foundation Service and a preview of VS 2013 and TFS 2013 will be available at the later this month.
It’s an exciting time now that we can start talking more openly about what’s coming in the next major release.
In this post, I will be talking about few features that Brian Harry talked about of the new Visual Studio 2013 that are related to Application Lifecycle Management
There’s so much new stuff that we will announced later at the Build conference.
One of the favorite features that I really like from Visual Studio 2012 is Agile Portfolio Management, Microsoft are continuing to build on the Agile project management features (backlog and sprint management) they introduced in TFS 2012 and the Kanban support they added in the TFS 2012 Updates. With TFS 2013, Microsoft are tackling the problem of how to enable larger organizations to manage their projects with teams using a variety of different approaches. current tooling is focused at individual teams and relies on reporting and Project and/or Project Server integration to roll that up for larger organizations. However, there’s a good opportunity to improve the solution to enable people at all levels of the organization to easily participate in a way that makes sense to them.
The first issue that tackling is work breakdown. Different levels in the organization care about different levels of granularity. With TFS 2013, Microsoft is addressing this situation by introducing the notion of different levels of backlog. For instance, a backlog of business initiatives can be broken down into a backlog of scenarios and then into a backlog of user stories, etc. You can manage the backlog at each level and trace the relationships. Also enabling multiple Scrum teams to each manage their own backlog of user stories/tasks that then contributes to the same higher-level backlog.
All of this will be included in TFS 2013 and is available on Team Foundation Service today for you to start to explore.
Another improvement that VS Team really working hard on it is the version control solution. There are so many changes that there’s no way I can cover it all so let me cover a few of the top things.
I’m going to start with something that’s a bit of “old news” if you’ve been tracking the Updates. Microsoft added a “Connect” page to Team Explorer that makes it easier than ever to manage the different Team Projects/repos you connect to – local, enterprise or cloud. This, among all of the other improvements we’ve made in the Updates, will also show up in VS 2013.
More features are available via Brian Harry’s blog, a preview of VS 2013 and TFS 2013 will be available at the Build conference later this month. so stay tuned!