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Using work item templates in TFS 2015 and VSTS

Last week I heared a colleague that he had to customize the TFS work item templates to prepopulate some fields with default values. I had some good news for him. TFS (and VSTS) has a nice productivity feature; work item templates. With work item templates you can quickly create work items which have pre-populated values for your team's commonly used fields. And that’s exactly what he needed.

Here are the steps required to create a work item template:

  • Open the TFS web portal
  • Go to the Work hub and click on the Queries tab

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  • Click on New and choose the Work Item type you want to create a template for

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  • On the New Work Item form fill in the default values you want the template to contain. Next,
    • If you are using VSTS choose the Copy template URL option from the context menu:

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    • If you are using TFS on premise, click on the Copy template URL button:

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  • An URL is generated and copied to your clipboard. Here is an example of the generated url:

https://mysubscription.visualstudio.com/SampleProject/_workItems/create/Task?%5BSystem.Description%5D=Default+description&%5BMicrosoft.VSTS.Scheduling.RemainingWork%5D=20&%5BMicrosoft.VSTS.Common.Activity%5D=Development

  • You can now share this url or put it for example on your TFS dashboard

Remark: If you don’t want to use the web portal but use Visual Studio or Team Explorer most of the time, you could use the Work Item Templates feature as part of the TFS Power Tools extension.

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