An existing Traceability Matrix with Team Foundation Server 2010 — how to practice DRY?

Question

We have an existing Traceability Matrix in Excel that has columns like:

• Project
• Business Rule Group
• Requirement ID
• Business Rule
• Type
  etc, etc

I would like to stay DRY (don't repeat yourself) in the sense that when we create a new requirement in this Excel spreadsheet...that its Requirement ID will propogate into and throughout TFS as needed. It seems counterintuitive/odd that we would ever need to re-enter this Requirement ID value in TFS.

Am I off base or is this perfectly doable? I recently watched this Microsoft TFS webcast. While informative, it did not address this fundamental question.

https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-IN&EventID=1032448402&CountryCode=IN

I then envision the creation of TFS Work Items that are tied to one or more Requirement IDs. This would extend and close the forward/backward traceability from our Traceability Matrix in Excel, into TFS Work Items, throughout subsequent feature requests/use cases/unit tests/source code/etc, and back again.

Thanks!

Answer 1

While I don't think tfs supports this out of the box, assuming you are keeping the document in the projects sharepoint site you could set up a custom workflow that would add the requirement id to a global list. How to modify global lists can be found here. http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/shair/archive/2010/03/08/tfs-api-part-23-create-global-list-xml-way.aspx

Answer 2

You can modify any work item in TFS, and thus also the Requirement/User story work item. You can add a new field in there that stores your Requirement ID.

Visit MSDN to see how to modify your work item: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms243849.aspx