I’m in the process of migrating our TFS Instances to 2013. During my research I’d seen demos with the “Features” feature. In TFS 2013, there is now a Work Item Type named Feature which is meant to be a parent to several Product Backlog Items. I was able to easily create features but I also knew there is supposed to be a Features Backlog. On my TFS cloud instance it works fine but there was no sign of the Features backlog on the web interface for my On Premise instance of TFS 2013. The screenshot shows what I was hoping to find. Continue below to find out how to enable it.
It turns out that getting this to show up was really quite simple but not exactly intuitive. Features needs to be enabled as part of the Access Levels portion of TFS.
On the top right side of the TFS web app, click the “gear” to go to the control panel.
You may see this menu. If not, skip the next step! If you do, just click the Control Panel link to go to the main control panel page.
Hopefully you will see a menu like this:
From here, click on “Access Levels” and you’ll see something like this:
You will see that there are 3 choices for access levels. We’ve got “Standard” set as the default. I’m not positive we’ll keep it this way and every team should decide for themselves what they want to do about the default. However, you must have “Full” Access to see the “Features” backlog. So add some users to that level or set it as the default. Once you do, users with Full Access will see the Features Backlog (similar to the first screenshot in this post).
I’m not exactly sure why the access levels are set up like this. I’m new to TFS2013 so it may be possible to set this visibility in other ways. But it seems odd that enabling the Features backlog is tied to other features like “Team Rooms” and “Test Case Management”. Those are great features but I am not sure why they are all lumped together.
http://www.schwammysays.net/enable-the-features-backlog-in-tfs-2013/