Professional Visual Studio® 2008

58.2. Work Item Tracking

Team Foundation allows you to manage activities using work items. As you will see in the following sections, you can search for work items using work item queries and you manage them using Visual Studio, Excel, Project, or Team System Web Access. There are different types of work items like bugs, tasks, and risks, and later in the chapter you will see how to create custom types.

58.2.1. Initial Work Items

The template defined some pending tasks. These are represented as work items and by default will be assigned to the person who created the team project. You will be completing this list throughout the chapter, but for now you can close the Set Permissions, Migration of Source Code, and Migration of Work Items, and assign the ones in the Requirements, Test, and Project Management disciplines to the appropriate persons.

You can select each work item and edit its details. You will usually change the state (active, resolved, closed), rank, remaining work, or the "assign to" fields. In Figure 58-3 you can see a list of the work items edited in Visual Studio.

The initial work item list may vary depending on the process template.

Figure 58.3. Figure 58-3

58.2.2. Work Item Queries

The work items shown in Figure 58-3 are all tasks in the selected team project. You could look for different work items using the work item queries from Team Explorer. The template ...