Creating Documentation and Release notes from TFS WorkItems

Question

Hello,

I am Trying to figure out a good method to get Workitem comments from a workitem in a non developer language for Technical writers (Non tech Jargen).

How are other people getting their documentation information? Do you create new Requiered fields within the WI template to collect data or do you simply tell the developers to be more verbose when writing comments with WorkItems.

The technical writers want to know the following:

What was the Change?

Why was the change made?

What was the problem before?

How was it corrected?

Please any advice on your standard operating procedures pertaining to documentation and release notes would be great.

Thanks





Answer 1

In General, I suggest adding two separate custom fields to whatever type of WorkItem (e.g. User Story, Product Backlog Item, Change Request, Task, Bug, etc.) that developer use to link to their check-in changeset. These fields are

 - Include in Release Notes  - Yes / No [A radio button type field]

 - Release Notes - [Multiline Text Box]. 

Then configuration / release manager can use http://tfschangelog.codeplex.com to produce output in html format that will list all the content from Release Notes text field based on identified changeset range and filtering criteria.

TFSChangeLog applicaiton extracts all the information regarding changeset and associated work items into xml format and then based on XSLT 2.0 transformation it can generate nice HTML output. Out of the box, it used "Description" field but it's possible to include any custom fields from a given type of work item. 

Hope this is going to be useful for your projects.

Best Regards,

Dharmesh Shah.