Team Services/TFS Roadmap update
Last week, we published an update to our roadmap (otherwise known as “Features timeline” :)).
If you’re curious about what we are working on and when it is coming, I encourage you to go check it out. This timeline is intended to give a rough idea what we are planning to deliver in the cloud over the next 6 months and when those things will land in on-premises TFS. Some of them are self explanatory and some have linked blog posts or UserVoice items to provide a little more context. I’m still waiting for a couple of blog posts to get published but they should be done soon. If there’s something you don’t understand and would like more info on, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
This is, of course, not everything we are working on. Some things are either too speculative or too far out to talk much about yet. And, of course, feedback constantly affects our prioritization so, in a few months, we’ll revisit it and, likely, make updates (both adding and removing things).
I’ll add a few comments on ones that I think are appropriate to comment on…
Git – Commit graph: Now, you will be able to view the Git graph (kind of like you can the TFVC Branch/Merge visualization). Here’s a screenshot from the last sprint video on what this looks like in the web UI.
Build improvements – Multi-phase builds, conditional tasks, shared variables: There are some pretty important improvements here that enable you to scale out your builds across multiple agents and have “merge points” – this is one of the things “phases” gives you. Conditional tasks also allows you to reduce the number of very similar build definitions you have and use conditionals instead.
Improved user management and invitation experience: Adding a new user now enables you to grant them access to appropriate projects and the appropriate licenses & extensions all in one place.
Managing licenses for large groups of users using AAD groups: There should be blog post on this one soon. This is an increasingly important need as we are getting larger and larger accounts. Today, you have to manage user licenses individually. With this work, you will be able to assign licenses and extensions to groups and adding someone to the group will automatically grant them the correct licenses.
Git – Notifications for pull requests assigned to teams and improved email design: Super important to larger teams or people on multiple teams. Now you can get notifications about any pull request assigned to any team you are on. The pull request mails are also going to look much better.
CI/CD UI updates – task editor, landing pages, templates: Our CI/CD experience is getting a ton of improvements and this title really undersells it. Among other things, the Build and RM UIs are going to become a lot more consistent (both are going to get better but the RM one, a lot better). Of particular note is a new graphical view of a release pipeline that updates in “real-time” as releases propagate through environments, looking something like this:
***UPDATE March 7***
Public preview for cloud reporting experience: Matt reminded me that the “cloud reporting service”, internally referred to as the “Analytics Service” is worth a few comments. The preview is going to land in a few sprints and you’ll be able to see it for yourself but I wanted to highlight at least one thing. In addition to enabling great PowerBI support, it also enables a new set of dashboard widgets (some you can write, some we will write). I think we have 3 new ones planned initially. They include Kanban cycle time and lead time widgets. Here’s a picture of two examples from one of our feature team’s dashboards (we already have the preview enabled internally and are just finishing getting it ready for public consumption). Once it’s ready, it will, of course, also be available in on-premises TFS.
Lot’s of good stuff in the works. Much of it will rollout in previews first and then become “default” experiences. As always, we love feedback. Stay tuned for more…
Brian
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