Skip to main content

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

image

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

image

  • 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:

image

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

image

  • 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.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t...
Read more

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more