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Improved Group Development with VS2012.2

by Jeff Martin on Feb 11, 2013 |

As previously noted the forthcoming update to VS2012 and Team Foundation 2012 adding features to several areas. Today we take a look at improves to kanban, tagging, and project management.

The previously released kanban swim lanes are receiving the key ability to be customized so that they better fit the needs of the development project they are covering. Prevously the lanes were limited to categories such as "New", "Approved", "Committed", or "Done". The new changes means that now state can be separated from category. As Microsoft's Brian Harry notes, sample categories "Design" and "Implement” can be grouped into the same state of “Active”.

The ability to tag work items in the product backlog is a boon to developers who are currently limited to organizing product backlog items through an area field or item title. The ability to use customized tags that are filterable will organizing and viewing work items much easier. For example, currently developers may use a system that uses the item title to organize: “[QA] Create new user” or “[GUI] Re-align dialog box buttons”. But differences in spelling and dealing with multiple groupings is inflexible. Update 2 will bring the ability to apply multiple tags to backlog items and easily filter the results.

The Team Explorer dialog has been expanded to show multiple servers and team projects. Now remote projects that exist on tfs.visualstudio.com or in a local dev environment can coexist side-by-side for simpler navigation. A previously mentioned feature, the ability to email a group of work items from TFS to another user, was omitted in the final TFS2012 release. This will be coming back with Update 2.

Finally, Sharepoint developers will benefit from the ability to provide extensible web and load testing. This means that developers “can now parameterize the input data in an XML file... [such as] tokens for authentication or columns lists.” While this will only apply to SharePoint applications, it should make for easier testing of those applications.