As most of you in the trade will know, Microsoft released in 2006 Team Foundation Server (TFS), a new product/tool that allows testers, developers and architects to work together using Visual Studio as its GUI. In this way, a seamless environment will be created where all these roles can work together, or at least this is what the Sales&Marketing department would like us to believe. In the practice, this level of integration is some iterations away.
TFS out of the box include two approaches: CMMI and Agile. In both of them it has the concept of work items (WI), among them, it has a WI named 'Bugs'. Unfortunately, I find the Bug WI included in these templates not very useful. So, if you want to create a new Bug WI in TFS with the product as it is out of the box, you will get the following
Enlarging the tab section (apologies for the bad quality of some of the images...)
As a tester I am surprised to see how 'developer' oriented is this interface. For example: I couldn't care less about the fix, however, however, I think it is very important to describe the steps to reproduce the bug. This is a single example... there are several more fields/tabs I would like to see that are not there by default!.
So, how you manage to customize TFS to your needs? This blog will guide you to the process of creating/editing work items.
First you need to have Visual Studio 2005 on your machine. Then, you will need to download the following tools from Microsoft:
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6270225
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa718351.aspx
The tool properly is the second link, but you need the components included in the first.
Once is installed, you will be able to access the documentation, that is pretty clear. You access the documentation from Start>All Programs>Microsoft Team Foundation Server Power Tools>Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Process Editor>PEUserGuide.doc
If you want to modify a WI, from Visual Studio you select the menu item Team>Process Editor>Work Item Types>Open WIT from Server
You will get the following interface
In this case, 'Add' a new control (controls in the .NET sense, like text boxes, drop down...) with type Plain Text. The reference name used in this case is Visiphor.Steps, the first part is the namespace used internally and the second part anything you want. For this example, I have created a new control named 'Steps to reproduce.
The second part of this article will refer of how to add this control to a WI.
