Brian Harry announced the launch of TFS 2013 to be scheduled at Build conference this year and some of the features are included for Preview in Team Foundation Service. I have been using Team Foundation Service for my talks at SQL Saturdays on “Agile BI” and noticed the new changes well ahead of my presentation for SQL Saturday #226 in South Florida.

This post is to introduce some of the new features that have been built into TFS 2013 in relation to the Agile Portfolio Management or Epics as Adam Cogan states in his blog.

The first thing you would notice in the Backlog page are the different levels of backlog. This is clearly to distinguish the granularity of a feature / task for diferrent people in an organisation. A business stakeholder would be more interested in a feature that is being developed while a business analyst would be keen to track the progress of user stories. Also notice the colour coding that has been used for different levels of backlog which makes it even more easier to track the work items.

On the top right corner, drilldown view options (from features to stories to tasks) are available for selection. This allows you to add user stories under features (or) tasks under user stories from the same page (Notice the green plus sign next to the feature / user story)

Board supports all levels of backlog and allows you to track the items under features and user stories separately (The same colours are used for items on the board).

On the TFS Dashboard page, there is a new addition of the Team Rooms tile by default. I will post more about Team Rooms after I try it out with the official release of TFS 2013.

Happy Stories!