VSTS Query of Work Items assigned to a team -- teams identified by Area Paths

Question

In our VSTS setup we have a single backlog with multiple teams. The teams are defined by assigning various Area Paths to each Team.

In our main project under Settings > Work > Areas, each Area Path is assigned to a team. Each area represents a client, and clients are assigned teams, but there is nothing about the text or sequence etc from which you can determine a team.

From main VSTS page, when I select the team from the upper-left drop-down selection and then go to Work and Backlogs, all of that looks correct and I only see the work items for the specified team. So I know that part is configured correctly.

When I build a query, I get all items on the backlog. What I want is to add to the query "Team = X" and have it pull all the work items based on the AreaPath:Team assignment. If I later change those area/team assignments and then rerun the query, it should reflect that change with no change to the query.

In the query builder I see a field called "Team Assignment" (the obvious choice...) and it even populates my team names in the drop down, but this field is not populated for any work item. I confirmed by eliminating this field and just adding it as a column to the results grid - there is no data.

This seems like something lots of people would need, but I haven't had luck finding any documentation on it. I don't want to create a custom field for Team Name (unless there is someway to have VSTS maintain it for me automatically).

Currently we are just tagging every story with a team name, but this is double-work and cluttering up our tag list.

We are using the Scrum template.

Answer 1

Assuming all the work items are already assigned to some member of those teams, I would create a query leveraging the In Group operator: in order to list all the work items belonging to a Team you could just create a query like this one:

Remember that any Team is a Group indeed: a team called "Developers" inside team project called "Suite" is referenced as the group "[Suite]\Developers"