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

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.