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Visual Studio Team Services Sprint 112 Limbers Up
Developers who use Visual Studio Team Services will start seeing some new Agile-focused features rolling out this week, with Mobile Work Item Forms and Delivery Plans among the highlights.
- By Michael Domingo
- 02/02/2017
Developers who use Visual Studio Team Services will start seeing some new Agile-focused features rolling out this week. Among the highlights, as noted in a blog from Microsoft's Brian Harry, are Mobile Work Item Forms and Delivery Plans.
Harry writes that the Delivery Plan offers a "first peek at our new Enterprise Agile" feature. A blog by Microsoft's Derrick Fu digs into specifics, noting that it differs from Kanban boards and Backlogs in that it offers "a view of the work from multiple teams (and multiple projects) laid out on a calendar with each team's iterations." Rows in the view shows a team's backlog, and each card in that row contains a work item. The row can be scrolled to see past a screen's worth of work items in that particular row. Delivery plan cards can be moved around and customized to show information relevant to team members.
Fu notes that the delivery plan feature has been dogfooded, and they've used it to do a periodic check of their own priorities and dependencies. Delivery plans can be implemented now while it's in public preview; it can be downloaded via the Visual Studio Marketplace.
Mobile Work Items isn't brand new, and Harry said that he's actually showcased it at the Connect(); event back in November 2016. Now that it's available in preview form, he said that "If you just click on a link to a work item from any notification email on a phone, you'll get the new mobile web view." He said that there are still some optimizations and tweaks that need to done to it to make it more polished and the team is looking for feedback from the community.
The release notes detail other changes, some in preview: Build Definition Editor, search and apply templates, search and then drag/drop tasks, repo permissions are more granular, improvements to branch policies and pull request comments. See the notes for a complete list.
As Harry notes, the new features and updates will trickle over to Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 1 upon release.
About the Author
Michael Domingo is a long-time software publishing veteran, having started up and managed several developer publications for the Clipper compiler, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. He's also managed IT pubs for 1105 Media, including Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and Virtualization Review before landing his current gig as Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief. Besides his publishing life, he's a professional photographer, whose work can be found by Googling domingophoto.