Good practices for setting up RTC environment

I'm consulting the community because I'm not sure we're implementing good practices in setting up our RTC environment. We're using the Scrum Process Template. So far we're only using RTC for planning and tracking, so we can put SCM and build considerations aside. (Or can we?) Our organization consists of about 200 developers, testers, writers, and UX professionals organized into about 20 Scrum teams that span three geographic locations.

When we started using RTC, we created one project area, one team area, and multiple sub-team areas, one for each Scrum team. We also created one work item category per team area and associated each category with its corresponding team. So far so good? We were able to create a product backlog and sprint backlogs for each team and all seemed to work well.

We now want to track development on three different deliverables (releases). The teams and people are the same, but the releases are on slightly different schedules and are happening in parallel. Initially I thought we would use separate project areas for each release, but realized that meant duplicating team areas and reports; not what we wanted.

Earlier this week I created two additional development lines. Now we have one line for the main release, another for a feature pack, and a third for another deliverable. I created an iteration for each of the deliverables, and iterations for the sprints in each deliverable. How am I doing so far?

At that point I thought we were set but quickly learned that to have separate sprint backlogs for each development line, you also need to define separate team areas. When you create a sprint backlog, you have to specify the project area, team area, and iteration. What I found is that by selecting the team area, I am implicitly selecting the development line (release) and therefore the corresponding sprints. I was hoping that the iteration would be independent of the team area, but it is not.

Now I'm creating additional team areas for teams who are simultaneously working on two development lines. Is this the best approach? Can we still share the teams' work item categories across the three development lines, or should I be thinking about creating additional work item categories too?

I was hoping to keep the structure simple, but it's grown more complicated now that we have three development lines. Is there a better way to set up our environment?

Paul Sims
IBM WebSphere Commerce