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Setting and Enforcing Quality Gates (Team Explorer Everywhere)

Quality gates consist of a set of criteria that you can use to protect the quality and performance of your application code. You can define check-in policies to enforce development practices across your development team. You can use check-in notes as a communication mechanism for collecting data from team members during the check-in process. You can customize both check-in policies and check-in notes to meet the requirements of your team.

Common Tasks

Task

Supporting Content

Specify check-in policies: You can define check-in policies to enforce the development practices of your team. You can disable policies to temporarily remove them.

Require check-in notes: You can require team members to provide specific information when they check in changes.

Important noteImportant
Check-in notes can only be configured by using the Visual Studio client for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. For more information, see the following page on the Microsoft Web site: Configure Check-In Notes.

Understanding Check-in Policies

You can use check-in policies to enforce mandatory software development practices. Policy is enforced during the check-in process in the Check In dialog box and the Pending Changes window. If a user attempts to check in, in violation of a policy, their check-in is blocked. If necessary, these policies may be overridden. For more information, see Override a Check-In Policy (Team Explorer Everywhere).

You can define a policy constraint such as “You must associate your changes with one or more work items.” This policy prevents users from submitting changes if they do not have a specific bug or task on which they are working.

When policies are violated, the violations appear in the Check In dialog box or Pending Changes window. For more information, see Check in Pending Changes (Team Explorer Everywhere).

Understanding Check-in Notes

You might use check-in notes to capture specific pieces of information during the check-in process. The information archived in check-in notes can be vital when you later view the details of a changeset. For example, you might want to see who performed the code review for a particular check-in.

You specify check-in notes when you check in by using the Check In dialog box or the Pending Changes window. For more information, see Check in Pending Changes (Team Explorer Everywhere).

See Also

Other Resources

Submitting and Undoing Pending Changes (Team Explorer Everywhere)