If you’ve been using Team Foundation Server for a while, you know it can do everything short of making you a latte as you walk into your morning scrum. TFS has come a long way in the last 10 years, and with the release of TFS 2015 and all of the features being released to VSO at break-neck speed, it’s hard to know why you should consider upgrading or even adopting in the first place. With the release of TFS 2015, Microsoft has laid down some SERIOUS awesomeness with a reboot of Team Build, a ton of new agile based team planning features that will melt even the saltiest scrum master’s heart, and easy integration into collaboration tools like Slack, Hipchat, and Trello with service hooks. And lastly, there are some cool new testing capabilities, some which are open to people with no licensing, yeah, FREE STUFF. Join me for a tour of the best of TFS 2015, IMHO anyway.

1. St Louis Days of .NET 2015

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3. Polaris Solutions ALM Practice Mgr since Jan ‘12
Been in the software industry since 1999
Runs the Chicago ALM User Group
ALM MVP, PSM, PSD, SPC
Has a *possibly* unhealthy love of Halloween
Polaris Solutions- http://www.polarissolutions.com/
Chicago Visual Studio ALM User Group - http://www.chicagoalmug.org/
Twitter: @OakParkGirl, @ChicagoALM, @TeamPolaris
Blog - http://www.tfswhisperer.com/

5. What the heck is TFS?
Why do I care about VSO?
New Agile Planning and Collaboration Features
New Testing Services to Support Constant QA
New Team Dashboards to Accelerate Collaboration

9. VSO <> Visual Studio on the web. Sorry 
VSO includes the entire TFS portion of the VS ALM
platform hosted in Azure data centers
You can leverage on-premise VS with TFS hosted in VSO
VSO offers build, load testing, and release management!
VSO services and Visual Studio can be licensed on a month-
to-month basis

10. What rocks?
VSO is super easy to setup
VSO is likely FREE for you, or at least really inexpensive
VSO gets updated every 3 weeks!
What’s not awesome?
Template customization is a bit limited (for now)
VSO does not have SharePoint integration or OOB reporting*
VSO is reliant on Azure (scary)

11. The more you know! -- TFS 2010 Went Out of Standard Support in July!

18. Quick hide/show parent hierarchies
Drag and drop almost everything
Reorder everything, including entire hierarchies
Visualize PBI tasks on the Kanban Board
Quick add PBIs directly to sprint backlogs
Re-order tasks quickly

20. Orphaned stories don’t disappear when you
switch views!
Expanded Capacity Planning Activities
Drag and drop sprint items everywhere to update
delivery plans

22. Board Column: current Kanban board column the work
item is in
Board Column Done: False (Doing) or True (Done)
Board Lane: current Kanban board swim lane

24. One-click bugs-on-the-backlog customization
One-click adding of new backlog levels
Set team-level working days from board settings

29. Use swim lanes to carve out special work queues
Communicate handoffs with Doing/Done splits
Use Card Styles to Visually Radiate Important Information
Make important tags stand out
Share your Definition of Done on the backog
Show lots of additional fields on cards

30. Card Styles
Show additional fields on cards
More to come!

33. Test Pane
Test Run Explorer
Test retention policies
Browser-based exploratory testing – coming soon!!

34. Share Test Artifacts (Print or email)
Assign test cases to external testers
Shared Parameters
Test charts – for both test case and results

39. Create multiple dashboards
Customize the dashboard contents
Explore dashboard widgets
Customizable chart colors
Longer trend settings
Sorry, VSO Only right now.
But TFS 2015 will have it soon! 

43. Team Project Rename!
There’s a reason it took 10 years :-P

45. Don’t get too excited, I already revoked that token 

48. https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/release-archive-vso.aspx

49. Ask for it! They really listen 
https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/

50. Team Foundation Server Building Extravaganza 2015 with Chris Kadel
Things like continuous integration and automated build are pretty ubiquitous in the
industry today. Microsoft has changed the build system significantly in TFS 2015 and in
this talk, we intend to take a journey through the changes and how to get the most value
from the system. We'll spend time getting to understand the theory of Continuous
Integration, as it pertains to value delivery and Dev-Ops.
A Look at Team Foundation Server 2015 Build vNext with Paul Hacker
Team Foundation Server (TFS) has a powerful build system for years. Nevertheless, the
next version of TFS will introduce a completely new system. Wondering what this is about
and why (again) belongs to something new to you? Join us to explore the next generation
of TFS build system and learn more about the background, the technical implementation
and the benefits (eg, Cross-Platform builds).

51. SpecFlow for Agile Teams with Alejandro Ramirez
Acceptance Test-Driven Development is a test methodology that picks up where Unit Testing
ends and can be leveraged to make testing a collaborative effort for the entire agile team.
We’ll look at the setup, syntax, the roles of each agile team member in making it work and
also at some strategies for using SpecFlow in a project.
Agile Metrics that Matter with Clint Edmonson
When it comes to development methods, lean and agile have clearly taken the lead. In the
spirit of Kaizen, this session will take a look at the measures we can glean from agile teams,
why the are relevant and interesting, and how we can use them to help our teams get even
better.

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