Why do sprints in TFS only show user stories?

Question

In a previous company, using TFS 2010 exclusively through visual studio, we primarily span Work Items up and organised them into iterations. Which worked fine: big pieces of work were organised under user stories, smaller items as stand-alone Tasks and Bugs could be created and tracked with Work Items to test and fix underneath them.

With a different employer now, trying to implement Agile, and we're using TFS 2012 primarily through a web interface. As the only team member with previous Agile experience I naturally fell back on what I knew.

However, it seems that the TFS 2012 web interface requires everything to belong to a User Story. Otherwise it doesn't show in the backlog at all, although you can still find it in TFS and log time against it.

So two questions:

1) What advantage is there, process-wise to making every trivial 1-2 day bugfix or incremental update belong to a user story? It would seem much more flexible to allow different types of work items to stand alone if required to do so.

2) Is there any way to change the settings in the TFS web interface to permit other kinds of work items to exist as part of the backlog, without needing to be linked to a User Story?

Answer 1

Every Process Template makes certain assumption about how you structure your work. You can either work within those constraints or start customizing the Process Template.

For example the Agile PT only includes User Stories in the backlog, and assumes all work will have a User Story with related Tasks (bugs are the worst here, because to conform with the PT assumptions it expects you to create a Bug, then create a linked User Story to plan the work, then create Tasks to track the work).

The Scrum PT in 2012 is better as it includes both User Stories and Bugs in the backlog.

If none of those meets your needs you can always start customizing the Process Template (by editing the Categories.xml and CommonConfiguration.xml) in the Process Template. Here's a blog post by Colin about customizing the Agile PT to include Bugs in the Backlog: http://www.colinsalmcorner.com/2013/01/subtle-msf-agile-enhancement-adding.html