TFS code Changes and work item associations to provide a perfect track for system changes

TFS is Microsoft's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution offering, compared to some of our most common ALM products, such as HP ALM, IBM Rational, Atlanssian Jira, etc. The biggest difference is that TFS collects the detailed processes and deliverables of software development in a single platform, enabling centralized control of software development assets. At the same time, the software development process of various roles, such as demand analysts, developers, testers, operations implementation personnel, such as centralized in a platform for the full sharing and interoperability of data, greatly improving the communication between different departments of the enterprise efficiency.

And in the software development process of the most important and most concerned, non-developer and source code MO! In a software development team, there can be no requirement management tools (someone with Word or e-mail management), no bug management tools (someone with Excel), or no test case tools, but no source control tools. There is no source control tool for the team, its development efficiency and quality, and therefore the resulting version management confusion issues are predictable. As a result, most software development teams use their own code-management tools, such as SVN, CVS, Git, VSS, and so on. Code management tools play a critical role in the backup, isolation, branching, and versioning of software code.

But with code management tools, it's hard to track the cause of code changes, especially for a long time, or if developers leave the research team for work reasons, it's hard for new developers to quickly get involved in code development. More seriously, the new team takes over the development of a software system, often discovering the need to spend a lot of time to tidy up the existing code structure and the reasons for the change, because of the complexity of the system, many people do not want to spend time here, so take the extreme way to rewrite the full functionality, completely abandon the previous code. This phenomenon is caused by a large part of the reason that the code changes are not associated with the corresponding requirements, tasks, bugs, unable to find the ins and outs of the code changes, the new developers do not dare to make any changes in the existing system, worried about moving the whole body, causing unforeseen problems.

To enhance the correlation between code changes and requirements, Microsoft TFS creates a strong correlation between code and work items, enabling you to implement demand tracking based on line-of-code requirements to accurately analyze the interaction between code and requirements.

is a direct association diagram of work items and code in a TFS system, and you can see that code changes (changesets) are associated with requirements, and changesets contain file and code change information for each change.

Figure 1-tfs Work item and changeset diagram

Based on these relationships, developers can select the associated work item for this check-in when they check in code, which can be any type of work item, such as a requirement, task, or bug, such as:

Figure 2-Associating work items when code is checked in

When the development team checked in the code in accordance with the above ideas and methods, TFS stored the relationship between code and related work in the system, and provided data records for the development team to follow up on the problem, fix the bug and so on. This data relationship also makes it easy to extract the affected files based on requirements or bugs, providing basic data for creating incremental packages for release builds. For example, we can use a popular free tool (sidekicks http://www.attrice.info/downloads/index.htm) to extract all the files that need to be affected, such as:

Figure 3– in sidekicks, get the work item you want with a work item query

Figure 4-Export the list of affected documents to an Excel (CVS) file

Figure 5-Show the code file that needs to be affected in Excel

Http://www.cnblogs.com/danzhang/ALM MVP Zhang Hongjun

TFS code Changes and work item associations to provide a perfect track for system changes