TFS Kanban replacement for Visual WIP

0
votes

We used to use the Visual WIP open source tool for our Kanban. Sadly this is no longer an active project and I believe it does not work with TFS 2015. To avoid customizing TFS templates our process is very much task based. We haven’t touched the TFS Story states. We infer the fine grained story state from the completed / incomplete tasks associated with an active story. Visual WIP supported us writing TFS Work Item Queries as the means of automatically populating each kanban column. As we migrate to 2015 it looks like we will have to manually place Stories by dragging them to columns. This appears error prone and a bit of a night mare for someone to make sure the state of the tasks reflects the column the story is sitting in.

Any thoughts on how I can either,

  1. Write some extension to automatically move stories, or,
  2. Use/Write some utility to notify us when the state of the tasks does not match the criteria for the column in which a story is placed?
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tfs-2015kanban

1 Answers

0
votes

You have several options. I'm making an assumption that you are using TFS 2015.3 on-prem, and not VSTS. TFS is functionally behind VSTS, only because VSTS gets new features every 3 weeks, where as TFS is packaged into about 4 releases per year (RTM, U1, U2, U3) and as such, lags slightly behind the features in VSTS.

TFS has a very accessible web-based extension model now. You can find the entry point to the integration ecosystem here.

https://www.visualstudio.com/docs/integrate/get-started/overview

On TFS 2015.U3, you have access to service hooks. This allows TFS to notify a web service that something has happened. The web service could then take actions via the other REST APIs that TFS exposes.

Service Hooks https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/integrate/api/hooks/overview

REST APIs https://www.visualstudio.com/docs/integrate/get-started/rest/basics

TFS also has a C# Object Model which can be used to invoke various TFS services via C# console apps, rich clients, or PowerShell.

TFS .NET Libraries https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/integrate/get-started/client-libraries/dotnet

I have a blog post about how to build a TFS PowerShell Module using the C# libraries (available via http://www.nuget.org)

Building a TFS PowerShell Module https://agileramblings.com/2015/07/23/building-a-tfs-2015-powershell-module-using-nuget/

I hope this gets you started.