TFS confused by team, area, project, area, iteration

Question

I'm confused by all the stuff in TFS. Can someone please explain how all this fits together?

• Team project collection
• Team project
• Team
• Area
• Iteration

From this page, I think a (team) project collection can contain multiple (team) projects, which can contain multiple teams. Is that right? Can projects contain other sub-projects? Can teams contain other sub-teams? The team defines a set of people (team members). Anything else?

I think the team can define its own area and iterations, or else inherit them from its parent. Is that right?

Is it possible to parse the area path? For example, when area path is "DSS\ADC\MML" does that always mean that "DSS" is the Project, and "ADC\MML" is the Team?

Answer 1

A Team Project Collection is a database containing a collection of Team Projects.

A Team Project is an organizational unit for source code, work items, build definitions, release definitions, manual tests, etc. You can have multiple Team Projects per Collection. A Team Project can best be thought of as "a collection of software applications and all of the associated artifacts necessary to plan work, build, test, and release the applications".

A Team is an organizational unit within a Team Project allowing multiple teams to work concurrently on different aspects of the software portfolio. Each team can have its own backlog, dashboards, etc. Teams are associated to Areas.

An Area is an organizational unit within a Team Project used for grouping similar work together. An area can be assigned to a Team, meaning any work items that appear in that area are in the domain of that team. Areas can have any hierarchy you want, and the names do not necessarily map to anything like a Team Project name or a Team name.

An Iteration is used for defining your work item backlogs and sprints/iterations. A team is usually assigned a backlog iteration, and then sub-iterations define the sprints and associated start/end dates for work.

Answer 2

Daniel has provided a good answer, but I want to clarify further.

• Team, Area, and Iteration are independent partitions of work items.

When you see Area Path = DSS\ADC\MML you should think: Area is ADC\MML within Project DSS.

Likewise, when you see Iteration Path = DSS\ADC\Sprint 23 you should think: Iteration is ADC\Sprint 23 within Project DSS.

Each Work Item belongs to exactly one area and exactly one iteration. You can imagine all the work items within a two dimensional grid of Area and Iteration, as below.

Just like Area and Iteration, a Team exists within a single Project. When you see Team = DSS/MML Dev you should think: Team is MML Dev within Project DSS. Notice that, unlike Area and Iteration, the Team uses forward slashes and the Team cannot be hierarchical.

The Work Items are not associated with a Team. Instead each Team can be associated with any subset of Areas and/or Iterations with the project. (To change the Areas and Iterations assigned to a Team, click the Manage Team gear icon in the top right corner of the web page). Therefore the Team is indirectly associated with a set of Work Items. The relation between Team and Work Item is many-to-many.