Customizing Team Projects and Processes
You can customize your team project to support specific processes and practices that your team uses. Before you begin any customization activity, you should become familiar with the types of objects and methods that you can customize, and how each can be used to support your project tracking requirements.
One of the main distinctions you will want to determine is whether your customization effort should be targeted for an existing team project, or if you want it to be used for all team projects currently defined and those yet to be created. When you apply customizations to a process template, they will be available in all new team projects that are created by using the customized process template.
Common Tasks
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Assess the scope and types of customization work that you require. Before you begin any customization activity, you should define the requirements and assess how you want to institutionalize the changes to be made. |
Determining Your Process and Tracking Customization Requirements |
Customize work item tracking objects to support your project tracking requirements. You can customize data fields, workflow, and work item forms that your team uses to track progress. For example, you could add two or more fields to a work item to track the type of issue found with a bug, and define pick lists for each that categorize the issue for the two levels. All work item tracking objects are customized by modifying an XML file and importing it to the server that hosts the Team Foundation project collection. |
Customizing Project Tracking Data, Forms, Workflow, and Other Objects |
Define reports that support your project tracking requirements. Depending on the process template that you use to create your team project, you may have several reports already defined. You can customize these reports further or create new reports. These reports may contain new data fields that you added to work item types. |
Creating, Customizing, and Managing Reports for Visual Studio ALM |
Modify how fields map from Office Project to Team Foundation. If you use Office Project to plan and schedule your team projects, then you may want to review and modify the field mappings that are used for scheduling. If you add new data fields to a work item type, you can map the field so that it appears in your plan. The Office Project field mapping file is an XML file that you can upload and download from the server that hosts the Team Foundation project collection. |
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Define dashboards that provide insight around your team's progress. Depending on the process template that you use to create your team project, you may have several dashboards already defined. You can customize these dashboards further or create new dashboards. |
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Customize process template components to standardize new team projects. A process template defines the types of work item objects available for tracking as well as the default rules, policies, security groups, and queries for use by team members. By customizing a process template, you increase compliance with processes across all team projects that are created with the process template. You also simplify the time to get projects up and running by defining the team queries, reports, source code control check-in notes, security groups, and more. All process template objects and plug-ins are customized by modifying an XML file. When you create a team project, you specify the zip file that contains all the process template objects. |
See Also
Tasks
Concepts
Quick Start Guide to Launching a Team Project
Tracking Bugs, Tasks, and Other Work Items