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: