CODEWITHSUNDEEP
tfs
PortageMonkey
PortageMonkey

Reputation: 2725

TFS 2010 Work Item State Change Date / Changed By User Fields are Updated Unexpectedly

Our company is moving to TFS to manage development activities and the State Changed Date and Changed By Fields are an important part of auditing who did what / when.

The problem I'm running into is that the default work item template (CMMI) assumptivly changes these values based on temporary selections in the state dropdown rather than the actual state transition chosen by the user on Save.

Example: Work item is in Active state. User opens state dropdown, accidentally selects 'Closed' but doesnt save, selects 'Resolved', saves the state change from 'Active to Resolved'.

Issue / Bug: Because they accidentally moused over and selected 'Closed', TFS also set the Closed By and Closed Date fields, even though the work item was never closed and no transition from Active to Closed was ever intended or saved by the user. This occurs with all states.

Since there is no way to prohibit accidental selection of states in the dropdown, this presents not only a major user experience issue, but can wreak havok on the integrity of the audit trail as theese fields can get overwritten at any time, even if the user never actually saves a transition from one state to the other.

Anyone else experiencing this and know of a template update to resolve?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1835

Answers (1)

Syed Ali
Syed Ali

Reputation: 279

You can solve this problem by using restrictions. For example:

  • Bugs can only be Activated by Testers
  • If Work Item Type = Bug, set Assign to to Tester and State to Active

From the above example, you can restrict your developers from activating the bug. You can also use the same method to restrict developers from resolving bugs, because developers should not be able to set a bug as Resolved.

With this type of restrictions, you can prevent wrong selections of Assign to and State fields as well as accidentally saving the Work Item with illegal values.

Thank you

Please vote up if this helps!

Upvotes: 1

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