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Our company is moving to TFS to manage development activities and the State Changed Date and Changed By Fields are an important part of auditing who did what / when.

The problem I'm running into is that the default work item template (CMMI) assumptivly changes these values based on temporary selections in the state dropdown rather than the actual state transition chosen by the user on Save.

Example: Work item is in Active state. User opens state dropdown, accidentally selects 'Closed' but doesnt save, selects 'Resolved', saves the state change from 'Active to Resolved'.

Issue / Bug: Because they accidentally moused over and selected 'Closed', TFS also set the Closed By and Closed Date fields, even though the work item was never closed and no transition from Active to Closed was ever intended or saved by the user. This occurs with all states.

Since there is no way to prohibit accidental selection of states in the dropdown, this presents not only a major user experience issue, but can wreak havok on the integrity of the audit trail as theese fields can get overwritten at any time, even if the user never actually saves a transition from one state to the other.

Anyone else experiencing this and know of a template update to resolve?

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add in more transition steps which clear those fields when other states are selected? eg clear 'closed by' when resovled is picked. –  Betty Jan 12 '13 at 7:46
I appreciate the recommendation - I Tried that route - used various combinations of rules on the transitons and states. Since there are some states that have multiple transitions (Active can go to either proposed or resolved etc.) there are a number of scenarios where it's not possible to clear or reset the state transitions accurately. –  PortageMonkey Jan 14 '13 at 2:02
The only other solution I can think of is disabling the changes on transitions and adding a server side plugin that does it when the workitem changed event occurs. Not ideal, but may be easier to do than the inverse. –  Betty Jan 14 '13 at 3:57
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1 Answer

you can solve this problem by restrictions example:

bug can be activated by only testers

work item type = bug , assign to = tester and state= active.

from above example u can restrict your developers to active the bug.

like that u can restrict developers to resolve bug.

because developer can not resolve bug.

like these type of restriction u can manage the wrong selection of assign to and state fields.

and tfs cannot automatically save closed by or any other fields.


vote up if it helps!

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Creative response, however we are an Agile cross-functional team so his may not work well for us. May work for others..+ 1 –  PortageMonkey Jan 29 '13 at 22:31
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