Work Item Manager Beta 4 is Here

Another release of the Work Item Manager is here and we have some exciting new features to tell you about! By far the most requested features for WIM have been a parent/child task board view and the ability to use TFS 2010’s new hierarchical queries. This blog post will show you a quick overview of these features.

Parent/Child Task Board View

We have added a new option in the task board which allows you to group work items by parent work item. In this view, the parent work items are displayed in their own column, and the child work items are shown in the task board swim lanes. This view allows you to easily visualize the work breakdown and status of a parent work item such as a Requirement or a User Story. A common use for this view would be by a project manager who would like to see the status of each major feature and its sub-tasks as opposed to the work assigned to each individual developer.

A few new settings have also been added to allow you to customize the parent/child view. The new settings include the ability to change the parent work item type, the child work item types, and choosing which parent work item states to exclude.

Hierarchical Queries

TFS 2010 added the ability to view work items in a hierarchy but until now, this type of view was not available in WIM. Using the Telerik RadTreeListView we have made it possible to use these new types of queries in the Work Item Manager.

Using the new link types and hierarchical queries in TFS 2010 provides a great way to structure your work items by making it possible for higher level features to be broken down into smaller, more consumable bits. In past versions of TFS, this was often done using Areas, but in larger projects, using the Area tree for this purpose was simply not feasible.

Other New Features

• Full support for Microsoft’s new Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template
• This template is now fully supported like our other core templates (MSF for Agile, MSF for CMMI, and EMC Scrum).
• Lighter theme
• Due to popular request, we’ve lightened up the theme a bit. There’s still no “theme selector” but hopefully the changes we’ve made will be well received.
• Bug Fixes
• As with every release, we’ve addressed as many issues as we could.

We hope you enjoy the new features and as always, we look forward to your feedback!

Download Work Item Manager Beta 4 >>