Summary

Work items are the driving force behind team collaboration using Team Systems. If used correctly, they can define all work and then track the progress and related metrics associated to that work. In this chapter, we discussed the many work items defined by both MSF for Agile and MSF for CMMI. We covered the basics behind these items, including workflow, work item history, linking, file attachments, and more.

Work items are also integrated into the IDE. You can query them and work on them directly inside Visual Studio. This capability provides a great experience for developers and testers. For example, you saw how developers can associate work items to their code during the check-in process.

Team Systems provides integration with Excel and Microsoft Project for nondevelopers (such as project managers). Work items can be pulled into these tools, updated (even new ones can be added), and then published back to the server. This chapter presented both these scenarios.

Finally, in this chapter, we showed a few of the ways you might customize work items and Team Systems to meet the needs of your team. We demonstrated the process of downloading, tweaking the XML, and then uploading the results as a new process inside TFS.