Generate email notification when scheduled timeline misses.

Question

Hi,

We have requirement related to email notification for TFS we want to sent a mail to particular group or person if timeline misses to complete any dev task for example we have assigned a stroy to a Developer and 3 days or 24 hours time  to move the stroy from Dev to Testing and if the story doesn't move or status is not change for that story from Dev to Test within given timeline then we should get notification via email.

We want this notification to be generated to track the tasks is done on time or behind the schedule so we can focus on work which misses the timeline.

Please tell me if there is any plugin available for same kind of requirment or simple way to implement this into existing TFS setup.

 

Thanks

Praveen K Verma

 

 

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Praveen Verma

Answer 1

Hi,

We have requirement related to email notification for TFS we want to sent a mail to particular group or person if timeline misses to complete any dev task for example we have assigned a stroy to a Developer and 3 days or 24 hours time  to move the stroy from Dev to Testing and if the story doesn't move or status is not change for that story from Dev to Test within given timeline then we should get notification via email.

We want this notification to be generated to track the tasks is done on time or behind the schedule so we can focus on work which misses the timeline.

Please tell me if there is any plugin available for same kind of requirment or simple way to implement this into existing TFS setup.

 

Thanks

Praveen K Verma

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Praveen Verma

Answer 2

There is not a way to do this out of the box as there needs to be an event to notify the subscription service to send email.  What you're really looking for is a way to see if something hasn't happened (let me know if the WI has been in the x status for more than x time).

To get this to work, there are two parts to the solution.

1. You need to see how long a WI has been in the specific state.  The field that is supposed to do this it Microsoft.VSTS.Common.StateChangeDate.  Unfortunately this isn't implemented in all templates and it is not on all work items.  You will want to add this field and put the update (copy from system clock) in the state transitions in your work items.
2. You will need something to periodically go through your work items to evaluate the state and that the difference between the age of that state and the threshold you've set.  The "right" way to do this would be by writing a small program to spin through the work items.  You'd also have the option of writing a SQL job to do the same thing and send out the emails that way. 

For me the SQL job would be easier, but that's just me -- I'm better at SQL than I am at coding.

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Ryan Hanisco, PMP
MCSE, MCTS:TFS 2010, SQL 2005
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