We have recently transitioned from Gemini to TFS for application change control. There is one aspect of TFS I can't get my head around - the lack of a built-in concept of the application version that each work item will be addressed in.
In Gemini every feature request, enhancement, bug etc can be tagged with a version number. If the field was left blank, the item was "unscheduled", i.e. on the backlog. Each version could be flagged as either released or not. Reports could be then created listing the issues addressed in each released version, i.e. release notes, and the issues to be addressed in future versions, i.e. a roadmap. I was completely happy with this!
Now in TFS I can't find any built-in concept of version. It seems like there are 2 ways to represent version:
As a parent item in the iteration tree, e.g.
Version 1.0.0
Version 1.1.0
As a parent item in the work items tree, e.g.
Version 1.0.0
Version 1.1.0
The latter approach looks better because it allows versions to be worked on simultaneously (e.g. a major release will be worked on at the same time as bug-fix release).
So what is the recommended approach to managing work by version?
Finally, with the version property not actually being present in the work item itself, is it possible to make reports on issues addressed in each version?
For now I am going to use iteration path to capture the version number. This doesn't lend itself so well to managing development on different versions concurrently, but we are trying to get away from that practise (i.e. be working on the next release while simultaneously working on multiple bug fixes to past releases) and adopt short release cycles, i.e. a more linear path, so maybe that is a good thing.
Earlier I though Area Path might be a good place to put Version, but its too valuable as a way to split up a huge application into parts to sacrifice for versioning.