Using TFS Task Management In Visual Studio

Today, we will see how we can interact with the TFS task management system inside the visual studio integrated environment. This tutorial will cover how we can create a task, explore/find tasks, create team queries for filter tasks, change states and make necessary updates on the tasks. I am using visual studio 2010, which has the team client within it. If you are using vs 2008, then you will need to update with service pack 1 and TFS team client patch to be able to use these features.

Wait! Do you have enough concept how the Software Development Life Cycle actually conducted inside Team Foundation Server? You should get some idea, otherwise while working, you may become confused in some scenarios about what to do. it’s good to be ready.

Well, if you don’t know, work items can be of different types, like tasks, bugs, user stories, test cases etc. We will explore all time to time. In this tutorial, we are dealing with the ‘Task’ items primarily. OK, let’s start our journey.

Create a New ‘Task’ Work Item:

Well, creating a new task may not be your responsibility as a developer, but it may be required in the case of a small team or if you are working with multiple responsibilities. You can find the option to create a new work item/task on the “Team Explorer->{ProjectName}->Work Items->New Work Item->Task” menu option.

Just for your information, ‘User story’ is also like task, but it actually refer to a feature and itself has several modular independent tasks related to that features. I am not covering about it here and skipping it, but you can explore it yourself as well.

After you choose the new work item menu option, you should see a new work item creation window inside visual studio, like the image below:

Though you will see a lot of options around there for creating a task initially, not all of them are mandatory. It only required the ‘title’ and ‘details description’ of the task for creation. All other fields can be adjusted as the project goes on.

Explore The Work Items Using Team Query:

TFS also provides a convenient way to explore all the work items as per your given preferences. You can organize these huge groups of work items into some sensible way for you, like ‘My Tasks’, ‘My Bugs’ etc. To get the such a facility, we will need to get used to ‘Team Query’ option, which makes the TFS task management easier and more efficient.

You should find this option inside “Team Explorer->{Project Name}->Work Items” option, such as name ‘My Queries’/’Shared Queries’ etc. Each item you create under the ‘My Queries’ option will be visible to you only. ‘Shared Queries’ will be visible and can be used by other team members.

To look at a traditional team query, let us have a look into a ‘All work items’ team query details given below:

As you can see, it will query for all tasks except those which are not ‘closed’ and not ‘Obsolete’. For a different type of query, you can configure/add/remove options as per need.

There is an alternative way to go to a work item. It is your top menu on IDE’s ‘Team’->’Go To Work Item’ and some other options as well:

Moving Ahead The Work Item As The Project Progress:

As we have a task can explore, it is time to move on. First, the team lead/analyst will assign a work item to the right developer, us. From then, we will follow the software development life cycle to update the state of the work item. After analysis and design, we can attach the design file on ‘attachments’ tab. If you are using the share-point server for managing such design files etc., you can attach that link here too. On ‘history’ tab, we can comment whatever is necessary to move to the next state. It is also handy when we assign somebody else for review to add a small comment on the history tab with our associated design file/shelve-set etc.

Hopefully, this small overview of the TFS task management system will help you have a basic understanding. Please let me know if you have any questions/suggestions/feedback. Happy coding 🙂