What are sprints children nodes of backlog iteration in TFS 2012?

Question

I'm not sure if this is appropriate for stack overflow but we have recently upgrade to TFS 2012 and noticed that your iterations (sprints) must be children of the backlog iteration. While the tool is rigid in that approach, I'm trying to understand if there is a specific Agile [Scrum] process reason to adhere to this or a tooling concern as to why I cannot have the backlog and sprints be under two different parents?

Answer 1

I've never looked at it as a bad thing, as I always found it makes sense. The Backlog contains all PBI's that make up the product or are desirements for the future of the product, as such it's one big list. The Sprints each are a chunck of stories from that list, but they're still part of that list. Since the sprints can be in the past, present and future in TFS, they together form the complete backlog.

Is there a reason you'd want it to explicitly not be a hierarchy?

If that's the case then you can opt to create multiple teams (if needed with the same members) to look at different backlogs in the same Team Foundation Project.