A Scrum Team consists of a product owner, a development Team, and a Scrum master. While your stakeholders aren't part of the Scrum Team, they will need visibility into the product backlog. The Scrum Team is cross-functional and will have the skills to cover design, development, testing, and deployment of the increment. From a tooling point of view, not everyone in the Team may need the same access to TFS.
TFS offers three access levels: Stakeholder, Basic, and Advanced. The TFS license required for the access levels is listed here:
The product licensing has been significantly simplified over the last year. A few key licensing changes have been introduced in TFS 2015 and now in TFS 2015 Update 1:
The TFS CAL license has been changed to include access to even more TFS features:
Agile planning: All backlog management and sprint planning capabilities in TFS 2015 web access are now available to any user with a TFS CAL.
Chart authoring: Chart authoring and the ability to pin/share charts to your project home page are now available in the CAL.
Team Rooms: Team Rooms are now available with a CAL in TFS 2015.
Test Hub: With TFS 2015, the web-based test experience for executing test cases (for User Acceptance Testing such as scenarios) is now available in the TFS CAL.
Buying Visual Studio Team Services, Professional, or Advanced license gives you a free TFS CAL for that named user with it. This provides several advantages:
You can now "rent" a TFS CAL. Rather than having to pay a onetime $499 (list price) license cost, you can pay a much lower monthly cost for as long as you need it.
Companies using vendors/contractors now have a simple way to manage people who need temporary access to their TFS.
The CAL is "always up to date". Because it is a subscription rather than a onetime purchase, you don't have to deal with buying/renewing your CALs when new TFS versions come out. The CAL that comes with a VS Online license works with any TFS version, whereas a traditionally purchased CAL supports only a given TFS version and earlier.
Access Level and Role are two separate things in TFS. Access Level dictates the features you have the right to use, the Role dictates the permissions. For example, with the basic license, the Access Level includes grants for source control use; however, if you are in the reader role, you will not have permissions to edit the source code.
The Team Foundation Server Access Levels are closely related to the typical roles in a software project and the activities carried out in those roles. The following table summarizes the feature to access level mapping. So a project supporter will only need a stakeholder license, a project manager or developer will need a basic license, and a tester or portfolio manager will need an advanced license.
Feature
Stakeholder
Basic
Advanced
View and edit all Work Items
Yes
Yes
Yes
Standard features
Yes
Yes
Yes
Agile boards
Yes
Yes
Yes
Basic backlog and sprint planning tools
Yes
Yes
Yes
Chart viewing
Yes
Yes
Yes
Chart authoring
Yes
Yes
Code
Yes
Yes
Build
Yes
Yes
Request and manage feedback
Yes
Web-based Test execution
Yes
Yes
Web-based Test case management
Yes
Team rooms
Yes
Yes
Administer account
Yes
Yes
Advanced home page
Yes
Yes
Advanced backlog and sprint planning tools
Yes
Yes
Advanced portfolio management
Yes
Yes
Analyze test results and manage machine groups
Yes
Yes
With stakeholder access, users can create and modify all Work Items, and create and save queries on all Work Items under their
My Queriesfolder. (This is a change from limited access, in which users can create and modify only those Work Items that they created, and query and view Work Items they created.) Also, stakeholders can create and modify Work Items using Team Foundation clients such as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Feedback Client.Can view backlog pages and Kanban boards and add Work Items through the Quick Add panel, which appear at the bottom of the list. It can't move items on the page or use other features.
Can view sprint pages and task boards and add Work Items, but can't use other sprint planning tool features.
To set up new users in TFS, the user first needs to be assigned a license and then added to a Team. In this recipe, you'll learn how to allocate licenses and add members to a Team, you'll also learn how to audit user access in TFS.
In this recipe, we'll be allocating the license and permissions to the following users in the FabrikamTFVC Team Project.
|
Name (username) |
Access Level |
Comments |
|---|---|---|
|
John Smith
|
Stakeholder |
John usually provides feedback via the feedback client and creates Work Items in the product backlog. |
|
Brian Miller
|
Basic |
Brian is a developer and spends most of his time programming and unit testing. |
|
Aaron Cook
|
Basic |
Aaron is a developer and spends most of his time programming and unit testing. |
|
Willy Peter
|
Basic |
Willy is a scrum master and developer on the Team. Willy mostly focuses on integration and SQL Server report development. |
|
Annu Arora
|
Advanced |
Annu is a tester and spends most of her time functional and performance testing. |
|
Tom Hacker
|
Advanced |
Tom is a business analyst and spends most of his time programming and integration testing. |
|
Chris Wang
|
Advanced |
Chris is the product owner. He manages the product vision and portfolio. |
In order to add new users to the Access Levels, you'll need to be a collection administrator. To add new users to a Team Project, you need to be a project administrator; if you aren't already, arrange to be added to these groups.
Log into Team Portal and navigate to the Access Level administration screen by browsing to
http://tfs2015:8080/tfs/_admin/_licenses:
From the left panel, click on the Stakeholder access. From the right panel, click on the Add button and choose Add Windows user or group. In the Add new user or group window, enter the user details as TFS2015\JohnS and click the OK button:
Repeat this step to add all users into the Access Levels as specified in the user table in the Getting ready section of this recipe. At this point, you should have one Stakeholder, three Basic, and three Advanced users.
There are two ways to add users to the Team Project. One way is to navigate to the FabikamTFVC project security screen in Team Portal by browsing to
http://tfs2015:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection/FabrikamTFVC/_admin/_security. From the left panel, click on the Contributors group, from the right panel, click on the Members tab and the Add... button to add Windows user or group. Enter the user details and click on OK:
The other option is to navigate to the FabrikamTFVC project home page by browsing to
http://tfs2015:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection/FabrikamTFVC. From the Members widget, click on Manage..., in the MANAGE MEMBERS OF FABRIKAMTFVC TEAM window enter the user details and press OK. Repeat these steps to add other users listed in the user table in the getting started section.
In the next few steps, you'll learn how to extract an audit log to track the last login of users and groups and their access type:
Navigate to the Access Level screen in Team Web Access by browsing to
http://tfs2015:8080/tfs/_admin/_licenses.From the left navigation, click on Export audit log. Open the downloaded CSV file; we'll explore this in depth in the How it works... section.
The default Access Level is assigned to a user that is directly added via the Team Project security or members screen. It is recommended that the default Access Level be set to Basic. If a user is assigned to multiple Access Levels, the highest always takes precedence.
Next, let's review the audit log, import the data.csv into Excel. You should see a view similar to the following screenshot. The Last Accessed (UTC) column tells you whether the user has accessed TFS or not; you don't need to pay for a license for users that have not accessed TFS.
