CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studio-2012tfs
KatyC
KatyC

Reputation: 3

Is It Possible To Reference TFS Work Item Fields More Than Once Within The Same Work Item?

We are currently in the process of upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS 2012. When TFS 2008 was set up, the people involved didn't understand a lot of what the work item fields were for, and we ended up with very heavily customised templates and in fact lost a lot of default fields. As part of the upgrade to 2012 we are trying to return to the out of the box templates as much as possible to ensure we get to use as many of the features as possible, however there are a small number of custom fields that we need to include for reporting purposes.

Our product development process involves a roadmap for upcoming releases which includes new work as well as bug fixes. When a bug is assigned to be worked on by the developers we would like to be able to choose which release we're targeting the fix for - as far as I can see, Iteration is best suited for this. At the point the bug is closed though, we would also like to track what release it was actually fixed in, since things often get bumped from one release to the next if higher priority bugs or change requests come in, but this is where we come unstuck since I can't seem to assign Iteration to both fields such that the two show different values.

If possible we would prefer not to have global lists that have to be constantly updated with release numbers across our product range (we have around 8 different products which are constantly in development, each with their own release numbers), and leaving one of them as a text field leaves open the possibility that we will get inconsistencies in what people enter, eg 1.01 versus 1.1 which will show up in reporting as 2 different releases. As the fields are just looking up a set of values in the background, is there no way that the iteration list can be used twice? Or does someone have an alternative suggestion as to how we get round this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 105

Answers (2)

MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood
MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood

Reputation: 23434

As iteration is time limited and release is perpetual there is an inherent mismatch of purpose with using iteration here. Iteration is for planning.

You would be better creating a release list with the version that you release.

If you are sprinting for example you may not know up front which release you will end up on before you start. If you are not sprinting then you are just kidding yourself that your know.

Upvotes: 0

mcr
mcr

Reputation: 782

What I think I'd suggest in this case is using a COPY rule on a state change event, so that when you move your work item into the Closed state, it would populate your custom field with the value currently in your Iteration field.

This would give you a snapshot of the value at the right point in time which then wouldn't be altered if the iteration was later changed, along with a history entry if it was opened & closed multiple times over its lifetime.

Upvotes: 1

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