Development
All of our developers and testers have an MSDN Premium or Ultimate. This covers them not only for TFS but also access to all there test environments and whatever software they have installed. They will remain at the Advanced access level.Product Management
The next layer of user is the product owner. Our product owner sits with each team and helps to manage and groom the backlog. They also validate work is done which means they use development environments. That being said they will continue to need MSDN Premium.I was hoping we could drop them down to Basic (TFS CAL) but the environment thing stops that. With Basic access a product owner could plan and prioritize user stories for their team but not features. I guess features is what Microsoft deems advanced planning. This would be a big cost savings to some companies.
Our next layer is product manages themselves. While they don’t hop on the development environments that still need to be able to plan and prioritize at the feature level. With Microsoft’s new license structure nothing changes for us. Again to get just that feature requires an MSDN license. That is pretty costly unless I can get them to use the feedback or storyboarding features.
The Stakeholder
This access level is free and allows the editing and creating of work items. If your product managers are willing to do some work in Excel this will provide your company with some cost savings.They can prioritize by using the Team add on in Excel. To do that just have a query of the features and make sure the Stack Rank is one of the columns. They can then modify the stack ranks to prioritize the work items. Once that is done a publish up to TFS will update it for the teams to work from.
This could become cumbersome as working with the stack ranks is not easy for a large number of work items. The PM’s at my company need to be able to work fast so this will not fly. Hopefully some one else out there will be able to do this and same some $$.
Happy ALM’ing!
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