List Work items that are ready for acceptance in TFS

Question

I'm using TFS 2012 with the Scrum 2.0 template. Here's what I'm trying to do:

I want to have a list of all of the product backlog items that are ready for acceptance meetings with our PO. But have not yet been accepted.

I'm trying to do that by writing a work item query.

Here is my criteria:

List all PBI's (Product Backlog Items and Bugs) where the PBI is part of the current sprint (iteration = a value I set) and the PBI.State is not "Done" (we will set it to "done" after acceptance)

and where all of the child tasks for the PBI are either "Removed" or "Done"

That last criteria stumps me. I can see how I can make it where any of the child tasks are done, but I don't see a way to set up the filter so that all of the tasks must be done.

Answer 1

You can create a Work Item with Direct Links query that resembles the following:

Note that I used the inverse check on the tasks. Looking for stories that have tasks that are done or removed doesn't exclude the stories that still have tasks that are in to do or in progress. But looking for stories that have no tasks that are in to do or in progress, leaves the stories that have no tasks or have only tasks in removed or done state.

Note that this won't find stories with open tasks when the tasks are nested. The only way to get these is to use a SQL query against the warehouse.

You might also want to have a look at th eBacklog Overview Report which shows your stories and the remaining work for all tasks. If your team is doing estimations and is updating these fields, then the report will show you exactly which stories are ready (and which stories have all their tests pass)

It is similar to the Stories Overview Report from the Agile Template and should be deployed with your TFS project when you have reporting enabled. (Note: this won't work on Visual Studio Online at present)

Answer 2

To do this, you need to change the query from "Flat List" to "Work Items and Direct Links"

Then you can edit the values you want for the Direct links. There are other options there as well to only return the top links if you don't want the child items returned in the query, etc.