All of these are nice tools, but there are a few things still missing I think.
- These are technical notes (more like build / history notes) but actual release notes contain more customer friendly items
- Not all of the information in TFS are wanted on the customer release notes (internally found bugs vs reported bugs)
As of now I use the TFS Community build manager to generate the technical build notes. It uses OpenXML and works fine for you build notes. It's even easy to create a custom word document for it.
For release notes we actually use the TFS User stories / tasks to be able to query on it. And for now, we create the document manually with the query results. We're looking into creating some tools that might do the following:
- Run queries corresponding to the document paragrahs
- We have a TFS template field indicating that the work item must be on the customer release notes (but we should change this to use 'special' iterations or so to eliminate the need of a custom field.
- Automatically fill in the OpenXml placeholders in the document the same way as the build notes generator does.
- Like the TFS Community Build Manager you could create a TFS Community Release Notes Manager that asks for query names and runs these queries to get to the required data.
The main question here is whether there are already tools that do this?