Parallel iterations on a single timeline?

I am surprised that you want to have overlapping iterations in one single
timeline. This does not make any sense to me.
We support overlapping timelines in one project area. I would suggest you
create another timeline for your case.

Hi Anthony,

I have seen requests like this too, especially when the development is more feature driven and require feature releases without synchronized releases across several parts.

I have ventured into if this is possible to do without having multiple timelines which also results in multiple teams and found the same issues with load/progress. I think this is to be expected, since the algorithms assume a partition of the timeline and don't consider overlap.

I am also not sure if a request to consider overlapping iterations in a time line would make so much sense. There is a work item requesting to be able to have one team working against multiple timelines. Obviously this is also not trivial to implement.

Ralph

Hi

I am working with a group that is defining a very simple project template - with one timeline and the default team. There are occasions when they want to have overlapping iterations. They will have iteration plans for each iteration.

Is there any fundamental reason (in RTC) that is will not work properly. We are currently looking at behaviour where the load/progress bars seem to cause problems (incorrect values).

thanks

anthony

I am surprised that you want to have overlapping iterations in one single
timeline. This does not make any sense to me.
We support overlapping timelines in one project area. I would suggest you
create another timeline for your case.

There are a few reasons you might want to do this - including work on a release and maintenance stream at the same time. Normally I would do two timelines - but in this case, the team is exactly the same, so the need for two timelines with the same team working on it seems to be the issue.

regards

anthony

I think you need to create two different team area even the team members are exactly the same. If there is still a load/progress problem, I think the Workitems or Agile Planing team might have some answer for this.

I've had also this same issue, I mean, being unable to have more than one current iteration.

If you want to work with multiple teams under the same timeline, sharing the same backlog and all of them working under the same release, you have to synchronize all of them to work in the same sprint iterations (creating different plans, one for each team), in order to set that sprint as "current".
However, this is not always the ideal way to manage all the teams. You might need to deliver products increments every week to the customer, so in that sense you could decide to put equal duration sprints for all the teams (let's say, 3-weeks sprints), but all offset by one week:
- sprint team 1 = week 1 to 3
- sprint team 2 = week 2 to 4
- sprint team 3 = week 3 to 5
and so on... the situation makes much more sense if the teams are distributed all over the globe, when you might have almost 12 hours of timezone difference.

Well, that situation is not supported by the "current" functionality. Of course you can think about a workaround for this (actually, we've been working with RTC although we have offset iterations for each team), but you lose some of the features that came with "current" (especially in the reports).

I think you need to create two different team area even the team members are exactly the same. If there is still a load/progress problem, I think the Workitems or Agile Planing team might have some answer for this.

With no go in details, I strongly recommend to not have overlapping Iterations. Planning algorithms do not count on overlapping Iterations in same Timeline.
Having additional Timeline and put overlapping Iteration there is proper solution - even if exactly same group of people will work in parallel Iteration.