exceltfstraceability

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


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

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!


Solution

  • 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