Work Item Relationships

Question

 

As for the three feature specs that are posted, they look great.  I especially like the new history dialog; I've grown numb to the pain of dealing with labeling and adding to source control, so the other two features are nice, but less of a priority for me.

 

I'm also aware that there has been talk surrounding Rosario of hierarchical work items.  We are very much looking forward to this feature, even more than the new history dialog.  The thing we can't do right now is described by the following "end-to-end" scenario, as mimicked from your PRDs.

 

Mark, a senior developer, wants to customize Team Foundation Server to better track progress on overall goals.  He customizes the default Task item to include a "Level of Effort" (LoE) field.  He then creates a new work item, Milestone, which has a "Percent Complete" field.  Mark defines a calculation rule for the "Percent Complete" field as the sum of the product of each completed child work item and its LoE, divided by the sum of the product of all child work items multiplied by their LoEs.

 

In other words, if I have a "Milestone" work item that has two children, one with an LoE of 1 and one with an LoE of 2, and if I complete the work item with LoE 1, I want the milestone to automatically show as 33% complete.  The milestone work item is currently the biggest thing missing as far as we are concerned.  We have in place the LoE field and a Milestone work item, but no (good) way to link the Milestone and its constituent parts outside of "Links".  Furthermore, we don't have a way of aggregating those linked items to have an effect on the linker.  Other parent-child calculations I could envision would be totaling the number of hours to complete child work items, the total number of hours completed, aggregating child titles for the description of the parent, etc.

 

Aside from that, please keep up the great work!  We love TFS!

 

Thanks,
Mark Stafford

Answer 1

I can only agree on that. We've many customers asking for parent-child relationships and automated calculations. Since parent-child relationships were postponed to VSTS Rosario, we've created our own parent-child relations via MS Project. A simple add-in which integrates with the Team menu in MS Project views work items in a hierarchy. We had to extend the process template a bit, but it's working fine. Unfortunately, we havn't had time to implement calculations.

 

BTW, the milestone idea is great. We should think about how to connect this with the baselining mechanisms (see other thread).

Answer 2

Thanks Mark,

That's a wonderful description of the scenario you're looking for.

We're looking to do some work on summary tasks and roll-up rules soon so your post is very timely.

-Siddharth

 

 

Answer 3

Hello,

any updates on this feature? I am currently looking for this exact behaviour.

Thanks in advance,
Henrique Narciso

Answer 4

Found this feature in SCRUM template.

Answer 5

Id love to see a Milestone template, or at least be able to create a workitem with child calculations.

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MCPD ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS DEVELOPER