Adding New Work Item Types in TFS 2012 - tfs

I am new to TFS 2012 and would like some help in customizing a few things. We currently have the TFS setup with the template " MSF for Agile Software Development". This was setup before I started working with TFS. I have done some research online, but I have not been able to get answers for my questions. I was hoping someone could help me customize our TFS a little. Some questions:
How do I add a new Work Item Type? We currently have Bug, Issue, User Story and Task. I would like to add Feature and Product Backlog. I would like to be able to create Product Backlog Items and link the Tasks and User Stories to them.
How do I add different Work Item Types the Kanban Board?

It's a bit much to answer all of your question in a short and concise StackOverflow answer, but here are the starting points:
How to customize Work Item Types
Create s Work Item Type
Add bugs to the task board or backlog
Customize work tracking objects to support your team's processes
witAdmin: Administering Objects for Tracking Work Items
Note: Many of the customization you want to do come out of the box with TFS 2013. It's probably a lot less work and easier to maintain to just upgrade than to introduce all of this customization.

See below link on how to create new work item type.
Modify or add a custom work item type: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh409273.aspx
But it looks like you don't need new work item type here because work item type "Feature" is already available in TFS 2012. See below link. The link is for 2013 but if you switch to 2012 you will see feature there as well.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997897.aspx
Product backlog item(pbi) is a term used in Scrum so if you use scrum template you will see pbi instead of user story. So user story is your equivalent to pbi.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms400752.aspx

Related

Is there an option to Hide/Show fields in work item(Inheritance process)?

I am new to the Inheritance process, I try to create a dynamic Work Item
Where selection on one field value will Show/Hide another field.
In the TFS 2018 i could fill the values Using different global lists - which are not available any more.
Using Azure DevOps Server 2019.
I tried using the Rules page on the process template and couldn't find this option - this is the only documentation i found
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/settings/work/custom-rules?view=azure-devops
Currently the answer is no cannot show\hide fields.
Found a question on Microsoft site - no realy an answer but some sort of workaround...
https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/idea/545504/hide-custom-fields-in-the-inherited-model.html?childToView=604861
haven't tried it yet
I'm afraid that there's no such option supported in TFS&VSTS rules now. Until now, we just support some of conditions and actions option which list on the doc.
You can raise your feature demand here to promote development of richer features.
Note: After suggest raised, you can vote and add your comments for this feedback. When there are enough communities vote and add comments for this feedback, the product team member will take this feedback seriously

How to distinguish data fix work items in TFS

I would like to distinguish Data Fixes from Bugs and Tasks in my TFS Work Items. I'm currently using the Agile workflow template and so only have Bugs, Tasks and Product Backlog Items as the available Work Items.
Is there a straightforward way of doing this, or would I have to create a custom Work Item as per this question: How do I create a work item type in TFS 2012
I would use a new Story tagged with "DataFix". You can then create a query to get that dates out again.
It's not a bug as you have no failing test case. Everything else is just work that is represented as a story in the agile template. It's a little easyer to comprehend in the scrum template as the work item is not constrained to "story" and is instead just a backlog item.

Workflow and issue statuses in JIRA with a Scrum mode

Currently working with JIRA 5, I was looking for information about the handling Scrum in JIRA 6 with JIRA Agile (formerly Greenhopper). I saw, the there is now 3 statuses: To Do, In Progress, Done.
I find the 3 above statuses not enough. Particulary, we want to know if a story is still beeing clarified with the project owner, if is it a draft, if it has been approved by the customer. For a task, we also want to differenciate different steps in the "done" process: development done, review done, testing done, etc.
I'm looking for experience or any hints about this. My questions are: should I customize the workflow for my needs? Is there any standard workflows which already better supports Scrum? am I completly wrong and should I only use the basic concepts of JIRA for a Scrum process?
Any ideas/hints/experiences/links are welcome. Thank you.
You can customize the JIRA workflow (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Workflow) and then map the new statuses into Agile columns
In case if you already have a configured workflow go to your Agile board, go to its configuration and navigate to tab "Columns". On this screen you can add your custom column name, change its position and drag&drop status to a new column in order to map issues with this status to a column. If you use standard flow and need more customized one which better fits to your process then the link provided by mdoar above explains how to do this in details.

TFS2012: Can we modify web access board filters?

Can we add/modify the filter of the boards:
Work/Backlog/product backlog/board(the stories/backlogitems)
Should be able to filter the Iterations/Sprints
Work/board(tasks)
Should be able to change the Areapath filtering
Is there any way to change the default filter and/or add quick filters?
As per this post, you can't really amend the underlying
query for the task board:
How do I change the underlying query for the task board (and backlog board) on TFS Preview
Although as mentioned the tags in TFS 2012 Update 2 can help.
However we achieved something similar to what you are
asking by creating a team per product.
In the web control panel for your team project, create teams (and area paths) for
each product you are interested in.
In the control panel, for each of these teams, you can set which
iterations are associated with them. So for a particular team,
you associate only the iterations you are interested in for that
product.
You are then able to switch between teams via a drop-down at the
top-left in the TFS web interface (you will need to use Browse All
originally.)
See Multiple Teams with Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012 & Visual Studio Scrum V2.0 for a good reference for this.
The Work Item Tagging feature in TFS 2012 Update 2 can help.
Other than that, you can write your own plugin.

TFS task with more assignees

What is the best way to store a task for multiple users in TFS 2010 ? I can only assign one for one task.
(for example: when I plan a demo to all developers)
(this is a scrum Msf Agile project, where the task is part of a user story)
I'm sorry to tell you that you can't assign multiple users to a single work item out of the box; At the same time, I do not recommended trying as this, as it does not fit the model in TFS. The conventional / recommended way to handle this type of scenario is to create multiple tasks; one for each developer in this case. You can easily accomplish this by copying a set of tasks using MS Excel. Another option (given the example you used) is to create a "Meeting" work item that has multiple drop-downs - one for each person that would attend meetings like for a demo or a technical review.
Yet another option is to create a custom control to format and store a list of users. This would likely be relatively complex to maintain, as you have to distribute it to each user's machine (it will need to be installed locally), and last I checked you would need 2 versions; one for the Team Explorer user interface and another for the Web Access tool that most people use to create work items from a web page on their TFS server. Future updates to TFS could possibly break your custom control. It is rarely worth the effort. Another downside is the you would likely be limited by how you can use MS Excel to work with the data you store in the field that the custom control works with. If you want to look into this further you can find some examples in the following CodePlex project: http://witcustomcontrols.codeplex.com/
You might consider your true goals in tracking such things as meetings and other items you want to assign multiple people to. Tasks are the heart of tracking progress of user stories in the MSF Agile Template. Tracking meeting attendance does not typically relate directly to a User Story, for example; so it won't typically assist you to determine how much close you are to being "done" with a User Story. If you want to take advantage of the existing reports, then you should organize your tasks so that they roll up as child work items to User Story (or Bug) work items.
Short story: you can't. Work items in the Process Template of Microsoft are designed to target nobody or only one User.
Now you can customize the Process Template to change this.
Take this post for instance, the customization works for group. But I don't recommend you to do so because TFS is basically not designed for that and you may end up disappointed.

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