This article compares and contrasts Teams and Member Groups within VersionOne and provides examples as to where each is most appropriate.

Teams

Think of teams functionality as a way to segment stories (or backlog items or requirements) to funnel them to a specific agile team. A set of stories is picked up by Team A. The members of Team A set their Team filter to be ’Team A’. That narrows the list of stories the team members are viewing to just include those assigned to them while allowing them to ignore those assigned to other teams as they do their planning and tracking.

What For
Teams are best used to represent:

• True cross-functional Agile teams who are working within the same release and on the same schedule as other teams

Where Used
Team filters are available throughout the Iteration/Sprint Planning and Tracking pages as well as in many reports.

Where Defined
New teams can be defined in Administration and/or on the Team Scheduling page. It is not necessary to associate individual people with the team. This association will happen indirectly as team members sign up for items that are assigned to the team.

Member Groups

Member Groups allow you to group individuals across one or more projects and generally do not represent true agile teams.

What For
Member Groups can be used to group individuals for a number of different filtering and reporting purposes, such as:

• all DBA's in the organization
• all contractors in the company
• everyone in a certain physical location
• direct reports of a given manager

Where Used
Member Groups can be used as a filter on the Member Planning and Member Tracking pages as well as the Project Assignment page. In addition, there is a Member Group dashboard report that shows the overall status and progress of a given member group.

Where Defined
Member Groups are defined in Administration. It is there that individual members are also assigned to Member Groups.