Using the Work Item Creator to create Work Items in a hierarchical way was the first step to reach one of the goals I set myself.
The Work Items are here to describe your project:
- On the management side with mainly the Change Request and Bug ones.
- On the development side with mainly the Task ones.
What about the interaction with the Source Control? Well, when we check-in code, we associate a Task Work Item with it. The Task is owned by a Change Request or a Bug, which symbolize a feature or a fix.
All the code we're checking-in is in a "Dev" branch, whatever the iteration we're targeting, when the development is done, it's checked in there.
Alongside with the Dev branch, we have one branch (created from the Dev on) per release of our software.
So what am I so interested to do? Simply to control the creation/update of a release through the use of the Work Items!
A release is done by selecting the features/fix you want it to contain through the selection of the corresponding Work Items. The Work Item Creator will analyze the changesets that belong to these features, and merge them to your target branch, ignoring the ones you don't want!
Here's a preview of the form:
A quick post to say there's a release 1.3 of the Work Item Creator on Codeplex, the sources (including the setup) are updated and in sync with this release.
I've added few features:
1) Now you can customize the Actions menu to specify the types of Work Item you want to create.
2) The icons corresponding to the Work Item types are now stored on the WebService so that you can add icons for your own custom Work Item types (see the "About & Setup" document about that).
I also fixed few bugs.
Drop me a message on Codeplex if you're using it, I'm always interested to get some feedback!
I'm pleased to announce you that the Work Item Creator and WINetwork are both available in codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/wicreator.
It's a start, the setup process is not as easy I'd want to, but I can assure you it worth going through it!
I'm waiting your feedback by email or directly in the discussion forum in Codeplex.
If people are willing to help the application evolving, let me know!
Concerning the Work Item Creator application, I've added interesting features:
- Siblings ordering in the hierarchy.
- Tree View filtering by Title content and by the following fields of a Work Item: State, Created By, Assigned To, Work Item Type. The possible values are dynamically built, I'm kinda proud of it! :)
- The saving process was optimized.