How to organize Tasks in TFS 2015?

We are using TFS 2015 and the CMMI process template for work item tracking and we have currently some difficulties in organizing our tasks. The main problem is that we sometimes have to work on topics which are neither a formal requirement, nor a feature, epic or bug. Each of those parent "topics" has several underlying tasks as childs.

What we would like to have is that those "topics" are displayed in the Backlog as well as on the Kanban board the same way as requirements.

We thaught of introducing a new work item type for that purpose but we do not want to mess up the process template too much and we want to stay align with the basic TFS priciples and not do some "hacks".

The other solution may be to consider or re-formulate those "topics" as (informal) requirements such that the "Requirement" work item type could be used.

Any suggestions about how to face this problem in an elegant and TFS-conform way are highly appreciated.

Requirement in CMMI process supports several types. I would recommend you use the them.

For example, you can select "Scenario" as the requirement type and add a tag "Topic" to the item.

And it is also very easy to add "Topic" type in "Requirement" if you want. Just add a list value as following in the work item type definition file:

And then import the work item type definition file via command:

witadmin importwitd /collection:http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection /p:<Your project name> /f:<WIT Definition file>