TFS Agile – Resolved bugs not included in burndown

Question

We have a customized instance of TFS2 2013, using the MSF Agile process template where we’ve added additional bug states and added bugs to the burndown using an earlier version of the process here https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj920163.aspx#opt_b. After many months or running this way, I have discovered that the Burndown will include bugs in New or Active state, but will ignore the remaining hours of any bugs in Resolved state. I confirmed this by creating a fake 60 hour bug which pushed the burndown up, but dropped as soon as I resolved it. QA can be a bottleneck for us, so it’s important that we include resolved bugs in our burndown.

I can’t find any clue to why this might be. I looked at the metastates in ProcessConfiguration.xml and noticed this:

<BugWorkItems category="Microsoft.BugCategory" pluralName="Bugs" singularName="Bug">
    <States>
       <State type="Proposed" value="New" />
       <State type="InProgress" value="Active" />
       <State type="Complete" value="Closed" />
       <State type="Resolved" value="Resolved" />
    </States>
</BugWorkItems>

There is a state type of Resolved, which seems to be what is suggested in many places. But if you look at the documentation here https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh500408.aspx, there is no type of Resolved. I tried to switch it to <State type="InProgress" value="Resolved" />, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.

So how do I get the burndown to include the remaining hours of Resolved bugs?

This is the reply to @MrHinsh, but too long to fit in a comment.

Thanks for MrHinsh for the reply. In regards to the first link you provided, it is the same as the one in my post. It’s actually a contributor (cause?) of my problem. By leveraging the concepts in there, we’ve managed to have:

The backlog to list stories, along with their child tasks/bugs. If a bug is not a child of a story, it is not listed.
The burndown to include remaining hours of tasks and bugs (regardless of if they are under a story or not). But as I mentioned, the key issue here is that it’s tracking the bugs in New or Active state, but not Resolved.

In terms of the second link, as I mentioned above we have bugs that are both at the same level as stories and under stories. The way we got around “Bug as Task anti-pattern” was to have bugs either:

When found while closing a story, we make them children of the story. That way, we can’t close the story until all those bugs are closed.
If a bug is found during regression testing or other activity, it is at the same level as the story (with no parent). It avoids the extra step of creating a task under the bug, which IMHO is an unnecessary step.

MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-26T05:21:39

The burn down only shows items in the InProgress type in the Task section of the process config.

You can easily enable 'bug as a task' and set the Resolved state to be still in progress.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj920163.aspx

If its not ob the taskboard then its not counted.

http://nakedalm.com/avoid-bug-task-anti-pattern-tfs/

You should however be carefull with this approach as it can cause issues.

TFS Agile – Resolved bugs not included in burndown

1 Answers