I am looking for a way to track the testing status of user stories in TFS. I noticed a field named Test Phase as an option in the search query, but I don't see how to edit that field. How do I edit the Test Phase of a user story?
I cannot see Test Phase as a field on any Process Templates I have downloaded (that's not to say it's not there), so my advice might not be accurate.
You could try and customise the TFS process template to show this "Test Phase" field on the User Story - depending on what it's purpose is. You can experiment with Microsoft Excel by creating a query and adding that as a Column.
Another option, depending on what you need to track. If it is just to see what needs testing, then you can Customise the Kanban lanes on the Backlog Board. Esteban has an excellent article here describing the process.
Related
We are migrating from an in-house tool to Jira for managing our scrum board, and we have concerns that I have been unable to resolve by searching the Internet. But you folks are smart, right? ;-)
Our current scrum board shows the usual swim lanes across state columns (for todo, progress, review, done). Each swim lane represents a user story, and has a link to (and a snippet of) the user story description in Jira. It also has a number of 'tickets' (these would be subtasks in Jira lingo) that start in 'todo' and move across to eventually end up in 'done'.
So far, Jira can do all of this, too (although creating sub-tasks is rather a lot more work in Jira than in our in-house tool). However:
When we commit code, we include a ticket ID in the commit message, and thus each ticket displays a list of commits that were done to complete that particular ticket / partial story. I haven't been able to find out how to do this in Jira -- if it's possible at all. Instead, it seems one must open a sub-task to see if there are any commits on it?
Each commit also shows its review state, which gives us an excellent overview of how close to done a ticket really is. I haven't been able to find out how to do this in Jira -- if it's possible at all. Instead, it seems one must open the sub-task, and drill down further into Fisheye(?) in order to see the review state?
In total, our tool provides a one-screen overview of the state of each user story, ticket, commit, and review state; and it's very lightweight to pull in new stories (from Jira) and add tickets. We fear that Jira is not able to provide such a one-screen overview, forcing us to open Fisheye in order to know whether a given commit has passed review.
Is it really true that Jira must be this cumbersome?
For reference, here is what a single ticket (subtask) looks like in our system:
And if you look at the whole scrum board, it's actually quite easy to get a feel for the number of commits on individual user stories and tickets, and the ratio of pending/passed/failed code reviews:
I agree with your fears when you say
We fear that Jira is not able to provide such a one-screen overview
In my experience (7+ years with Jira/Agile) I've not seen a such condensed view of information about a sigle user story even on a swimlane with relative cards.
Also in the Atlassian marketplace there seems to be no good plugin to solve your issue, even partially.
To make such move from your in-house tool to Jira retaining all you have there, I fear you should develop a custom Plug-in using Jira SDK to integrate with the agile boards.
It may be enough to start by developing a custom field to show what you need from a "ticket" (ie sub-issue) and trying to insert it into one of the three "slots" available for cards (I mean Rapidboard card layout configuration screen).
If you wanna try, start from here.
Another option to create a new custom field would be the Adaptavist Scriptrunner plugin. It will ease the building of custom fields: your new field can be written also in Groovy rather than plain Java. I've used it to build an extended status custom field (just to give the user an immediate big picture of it) that informs him in plain english and with stylish css colors why an issue is blocked or anything else relevant, getting data from other fields or linked issues that are not immediately visible to the user. IMHO, it is very similar to your problem.
One of our customer is using scrum based project and he is looking for the original estimate field in the warehouse table. As we know it's available for Agile based project but not for the scrum one's, is there any possible way to get the customized field added and get that populated in warehouse?
Actually in Scrum there is a equivalent “Effort” field on the Product Backlog Item is meant to be any unit the team decides they want to use. See this User Voice for details.
A project created with the Agile or CMMI process template will have
that field and it will create the field in the cube. Scrum projects
don't have that field, so if your project is created with the Scrum
process template your Task work item does not have that field and the
value in the cube will be blank.
You can customize your Task work item to add the field.
So, yes, you can customize your Task work item to add the field if you want to capture the original estimate of the task. You can use the process editor in the power tools for that purpose or you can use witadmin. See Add or modify a field to track work for details.
You can reference below screenshot to add the original estimate filed for Task with the Process Editor:
I'm asking this question on behalf of a colleague (which means I may have the terminology incorrect).
When a colleague adds a Test Case to a card, a requirement test suite is created in the wrong test plan.
We don't want a test suite to be created, we just want the test cases to be on the card itself.
How can we change this behaviour in TFS?
I did not see any settings for the test plan creation. The test plan creation works with next steps (tested on vsts):
System tries to find any plan with requirement. If there is no any plan then next.
System tries to find any plan with the iteration path from requirement. If plan exists system will import requirement to that plan. If there is no any plan then next.
System creates plan with iteration path from requirement and with requirement.
So you may use a workaround:
Create iterations for all test plans that you plan to use.
Assign needed iteration for selected test plan.
Assign needed iteration for requirements that will be used for testing.
There is no option to disable this behavior. But you can create a test plan and then configure the VSTS/TFS to place all the test case there:
Click the "Configure team settings" button:
Navigate to "Tests" panel and then choose "Select a test plan".
Using the power tool I was able to add a new custom field but I want that it take automatically a specific value if present.
Each test case has a "user story" associated but to associate it we have to go in "Tested User Story Section" so I'd like that in the main page appear automatically the ID of the user story.
Sorry for the confusion maybe with the image will be more understandable:
Someone can advice me of what to introduce in the Visual Studio Power Tool please? because I'm finding different example but none explain how to auto-populate with another dynamic item.
If you are asking me why it's because we want to have the "User Story ID" present in the main page so we know directly at which user story the test case is associated:
There is no way to get the User Story ID as a field. Since a single Test Case can test multiple User Stories this makes little sense anyway.
Have you tried adding Requirement based Suits to Test Professional so that you can see all of the Test Cases under a Story? From a testing perspective it makes lots of sense to look from the Story down to Tests rather than Test up to Stories.
Although my screenshots are from the Web App the features at the same in MTM. You can add a Requirement Based Test Suite that relates back to the User Story.
As #MrHinsh mentioned, there is no direct way to get the User Story ID from a field.
From TFS query, it's easy to get the linked User Story, you can select the Work Item and Direct Links in work item query, check the screenshot below:
Our team is getting started with using user stories for gathering requirements. We are experiencing some confusion about how they should be mapped to tasks. It seems we have several user stories that describes different aspects of the same fundamental development task. For example...
User stories:
As an XYZ user, I want to enter targets into a form, so that I can track progress towards them
As an XYZ user, I want to only be able to enter positive integers for a target, so that I can't enter erroneous data
As an XYZ user, I want to filter on available targets, so that I can focus only on particular ones
Task:
Develop a form for entering targets with validation and filtering
The problem here is that we are using TFS which prevents a development task from having multiple parents. Presumably this is because we are getting this approach wrong somehow in the first place.
Can anyone please suggest how this should be done?
We have exactly the same challenge in our projects. And it OK to have a task that provides (part of) the required functionality embedded in the user stories.
How we handle this:
Relate the task as a CHILD to the user story with the highest priority after release/sprint planning is done.
Relate the same task as RELATES TO to the other user stories.
In practice, the task hours are rolled-up into the first user story being processed. The task is then already done when the following user stories are put into sprints.
Would that work for you?
Firstly in the example above the task has three components at least
form
validation
filtering
it looks like three tasks three stories
solved?