Determining Your Process and Tracking Customization Requirements

Before you customize your project tracking objects and processes, you should assess the scope of your requirements. The four scope areas for you to consider are:

  • If you want to make changes for a single team project or for all new team projects

  • If you want to integrate requirements with other Team Foundation applications

  • If you want to include localization and globalization requirements

  • If you want to include flexible reporting and integration across team projects

Common Tasks

Title

Description

Assess how extensive you want to make your customizations. You can customize an object that is specific for a team project or you can customize your system so that changes are available to all existing team projects, including projects that you will create in the future.

Assess your data integration requirements. It can be useful to use the value of a specific field defined by a Team Foundation application, such as Team Foundation Build, Test Manager, Test Agent 2010, or Team Foundation version control, to automate the population of a field in a work item type. You can determine which fields you want to use and how you want to use them to streamline your project tracking processes.

Assess your localization and globalization requirements. You can localize the names of a few work item tracking objects. Understanding what you can localize and customizing your work item objects to support your global teams should be completed as part of your customization efforts.

Assess category groups required to support cross-group efforts. When you have similar work items with different names, you can use categories to group them and generate reports more easily.

See Also

Concepts

Customizing Team Projects and Processes