Can we generate release notes from TFS

Question

Can we get release information from checkedIN history.

we are using TFS 2012.

we have frequent release mostly on each week or on each 14 days.

Can we generate release document from TFS ?

(something like, based on TFS checked IN comments OR some how )

Answer 1

One way to do this would be to use Work Items (e.g. User Stories and Bugs) to generate your release notes.

But this requires your team to have the discipline to enter the information into TFS that allows it to associate work items with a release. For example:

• Require developers to associate change sets with work items
• Use fields such as "Iteration" or "Integrated in build" in work items to identify the release to which a work item belongs.

You could then create a suitable Team Query and export it to Excel to generate release notes.

Answer 2

I tend to use the Tf history command line tool to get information of changesets between two particular dates (or changesets). You can pass the /format:detailed parameter to get details such as changes involeed.

For example, the following will list all the changes between the 01/02/2014 & 24/04/2014 and write it to the history file.

tf history /noprompt * /recursive /v:D01/02/2014~D24/04/2014 /format:detailed > C:\history.txt

Answer 3

I like the TFS Changelog tool. Ready to use and easy to integrate.

TFS ChangeLog allows Team Foundation Server (TFS) users to extract information related to Changesets and associated WorkItems into XML format that is transformed into HTML.

Answer 4

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?

Answer 5

I know this is an old question, but perhaps you can use this task extension Generate Release Notes Build Task (for local TFS or as an extension to VisualStudio.com).

This extension is a build task you can use in build steps. This task generates a markdown release notes file based on a template passed into the tool. Here is an example of release notes output:

Release notes for build SampleSolution.Master

Build Number: 20160229.3 Build started: 29/02/16 15:47:58 Source Branch: refs/heads/master

Associated work items

Task 60 [Assigned by: Bill ] Design WP8 client Associated change sets/commits

ID bf9be94e61f71f87cb068353f58e860b982a2b4b Added a template ID 8c3f8f9817606e48f37f8e6d25b5a212230d7a86 Start of the project