Bulk Generation of Tasks in TFS

Background

It usually took me hours to add all tasks for my team for the next sprint in TFS. Existing UIs for this purpose were too sl-o-o-o-w, both built-in Team Explorer and Web Access (I mean Web Access for TFS 2010; 2012 is better in this context). The most annoying thing is that I usually need to specify just title and estimate for tasks but have to wait until the whole complex task entry form is loaded and then closed.

I also found bulk work items generation by means of Excel is not that convenient for addition of hierarchical (parent-child) data.

So I made a small utility for this purpose. Details and source code can be found here:

• https://github.com/marss19/bulk-task-generation-in-tfs

Using the Tool

The main form is divided in 3 parts:

• main menu: You can select a TFS project here, specify an area and/or an iteration to filter displayed work items and select a template for tasks creation. The default template containing all required fields is created automatically for each project. You can add more templates in case of need.
• left panel: The work items tree is displayed here; it can be filtered by area and/or iteration. You also can load a selected item specifying its ID.
• right panel: Tasks template is displayed here; fields that should be the same for all new tasks are listed in the top part (e.g. State); items that should be unique for each item (e.g. Title) are listed in the grid below. The grid supports pasting data copied from Excel.

Use Task Template -> Manage Templates menu item to create/edit/delete tasks templates.

Build Details

The solution requires Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2010 (or newer) to be installed. It has references to Microsoft.TeamFoundation.*.dlls which provide TFS API.