TFS Mandatory Work Item automatic creation?

Question

I am upgrading our team from TFS 2005 up to 2012. One of the things that we currently do and have always done is to have some mandatory work items that we do for every piece of work. We are going down the SCRUM route, so image that for every sprint, I want a set of mandatory work items to be added as tasks to the sprint. We manually create these at the moment either by manually creating in the VS IDE or by Excel. These items typically consist of 'Update Registers', 'Update Specification', ' Update User Guide', 'Deploy to UAT', 'Deploy to Live' etc.

This process works for us and we intend to continue doing it. Does anyone know of a way that these items could be automatically generated (they are always the same and should exist for every sprint). Ideally, I'd like to add them to the SCRUM template, but failing that, I plan to write an Excel add-in that simply adds the data in so that we can publish to TFS.

Cheers

Are you aware that there is no upgrade path from TFS 2005 to TFS 2012? — MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood
Just because you've always done something that way, doesn't mean it is the best way. Perhaps you should consider looking at a "definition of done" which would encompass the extraneous tasks that you are speaking of. Also, you can't actually upgrade from 2005 to 2012. — Andrew Clear
When I said upgrade, I guess I meant 'moving to'. We are not taking any existing Work Items or other history with it. Thanks, I've looked at DOD's but I have done this by using Tfs Alerts and a Web Service using the Tfs SDK. — Rodders

Rodders Rodders · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-18T11:00:52

Just in case anyone else would like to know. I have solved my problem by using the TFS Alerts and a WCF Web Service to create my work items.

We are using the Agile Process Template now as it was better suited for us. I have it now set up so that when a new User Story is created with text 'Mandatory Tasks' in the title, TFS triggers an alert and calls a WCF Web Service. This Web Service receives the event and creates my work items which are held in a separate new table within the Tfs_DefaultCollection database. The work items are created using the TFS SDK and are all linked to the User Story. With this, I get to specify all the other info, such as AssignedTo, Priority, OriginalEstimate etc.

TFS Mandatory Work Item automatic creation?

1 Answers