Overview

TFS Work Item Manager is an innovative team workload coordination platform that helps you manage your TFS work items in a much more efficient and intuitive way. By leveraging the powerful capabilities of Microsoft’s TFS combined with more flexibility and ease of use, the tool aims at enhancing your overall project productivity.

Features

• Hierarchical Queries

  Take full advantage of TFS 2010’s new link types and hierarchical queries by viewing them in WIM, powered by the Telerik RadTreeListView for WPF. Not only does the RadTreeListView display the data in a hierarchical grid, it also adds powerful grid features such as filtering, sorting, searching, and editing.

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• Parent/Child Task Board View

  Grouping by parent work item displays the parent in its own column, and the child work items in the swim lanes. Using this view you can easily visualize the work breakdown and status of parent work items such as a Requirements, User Stories, or Product Backlog Items. For instance, a project manager might like to see the status of each major feature and its sub-tasks as opposed to the work assigned to each individual developer.

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• Work Item grid filtering, grouping, and aggregation

  All work items are displayed in a grid (powered by Telerik RadGrid for WPF) and thus taking advantage of all its powerful capabilities to filter, group, and aggregate results. For example, users can filter work items by title and description - just start typing and the filters will be applied immediately.

  

  You can also group the results by different values, as well as forms of aggregation just like Excel’s pivot table, only that now you can edit the values completely dynamically. One of the most important filters is the "current" iteration one. To filter out work items not relevant to the current iteration, many organizations maintain a “current iteration” query that is updated after every sprint. Since the TFS Work Item Manager maintains dates for iterations, you can quickly filter any query to only show the items in the current iteration!

  

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• Area and Iteration filtering using single and multi select modes

  With the TFS Work Item Manager you can quickly switch between iterations thus filtering out all the work items that don’t exist in a particular iteration. Multi-select mode is also available to help you fine tune your query.

  

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• Filter query results using a tree of areas or iterations

  TFS Work Item Manager employs a tree view to visually represent areas and iterations instead of using a simple drop down list. The tree visualization provides users with a really dynamic way of filtering out work items without the need to struggle with Excel or be a master in creating queries. Unlike Microsoft’s TFS, you can also see the current iteration with just a click of a button!

  

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• Unique Task board view of work items independent from any process template

  TFS Work Item Manager features an advanced Task board that allows information to be pulled from TFS and displayed as post-it notes showing work items and the state they are in. Move these notes around by drag-and-drop or group them by different fields. The Task board can be detached as a standalone floating window and run outside the TFS Work Item Manager. You may also modify the work items and have them saved to TFS from the Task Board, or check for all related work items. Additionally, the Task Board can work with any process template.

  

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• Print work item cards for the board in your room

  If your team maintains a physical task board, you can print work items as cards by using Telerik Reporting tool to physically represent selected work items. Each card is color coded based on the work item type and contains the work item type name, ID, and title.

  

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• Iteration schedule

  TFS Work Item Manager allows you to schedule iterations – users can define start, end date, and predecessor information for all of the iterations that are defined for this particular project. Unlike Microsoft’s TFS, you can also see the current iteration with just a click of a button!

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• Iteration Planning ToolNew

  This brand new planning interface lets you take work items directly from the product backlog and schedule them into future iterations. What’s more, the Iteration Planner also takes into account the capacity limitations of these iterations. Choose work items from your Product Backlog, add them to the "iteration bucket" and you’ll see the effect your actions cause to the capacity. Thus you’ll get an idea how much work has been added to the iteration. You can also have one work item moved from one bucket to another and see what effect this action will have on your planning.

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• Paste as New/Current work item

  In TFS Work Item Manager you can easily just copy and paste your comments, new tasks and issues as a new item or directly in the selected existing item. Using the "Paste to new work item" button or the "Paste to current work item" button, your Windows Clipboard content (files, images, URLs, text) will be added to the work item.

  

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• "New by example" saves your query for other team members

  If you really liked the filters, groupings, sorting you applied to an existing query in the TFS Work Item Manager, you can have it saved as a new query for future use. By clicking the "New by Example" button you actually save all the filtering criteria you’ve just created, as a brand new query. Other people on the project team would also be able to use it. What’s more, you don’t need to learn how to use a query builder; you only need to use this tool to craft a query from the view of the work items you currently see.

  

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• Search the title and description of query results as you type

  Unlike Team Explorer, the TFS Work Item Manager also provides the ability to search for text contained within the title and description of the work items displayed in the grid. To start searching for work items, simply start typing in the Search Title and Description field located at the top of the query results. The TFS Work Item Manager will perform the search as you type!

  

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• Built with RadControls for WPF

  TFS Work Item Manager and TFS Project Dashboard are not just handy applications; they are also an excellent showcase of how RadControls for WPF can help you build line of business applications. The below Telerik WPF controls were used by Imaginet Resources to build the two applications:

  • GridView
  • TreeView
  • Chart
  • TabControl
  • DatePicker
  • ComboBox
  • NumericUpDown

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