Grant Holliday

I’ll start with an example. This example of the new query “Work Breakdown” shows how “Tasks” are child items of “Features”.

And then this is how it is represented in Excel in “Tree List” mode. There is a new “Title” column for each level of the hierarchy.

Adding new Tree Levels / Children

Update: Looks like this does work. In fact, it works great! I’m not sure what I was doing, but I can’t reproduce it now. Must be a PEBKAC.

Trap: Don’t think that you can just “Insert New Row”, and fill in the “Title 2″ column – it won’t work the way you think.

Update: You can collapse/expand all by using Shift+(Left Arrow) and Shift+(Right Arrow).

There are two ways to achieve multiple levels of work items:

1. In Excel, select the ‘Add Tree Level’ button, then add a new child work item at the next level. 
2. In Team Explorer, add a new parent or child link on the “Links” tab.

This is what the View/Edit Links and Attachments dialog looks like in Excel:

I have a few problems with this dialog. Let me explain the buttons and compare their behavior in Excel and Team Explorer: 

• Open…
• In Excel: Opens IE at http://aug07rosarioctp:8080/WorkItemTracking/WorkItem.aspx?artifactMoniker=XXX
• Why? Why not open the work item form?
• In Team Explorer: Opens the work item form.

• Edit…
  • In Excel + Team Explorer: You can’t change the linked item, only the comment of the linked item.
  • If you want to change the parent of a work item, you have to delete the link, and then add a new one. That seems a little bit odd to me.

Remaining / Completed Work & Excel

This was a little confusing for me at first. If you update the remaining work for a child work item:

• In Team Explorer: The value isn’t rolled up to the parent work items.
  • Expected behavior? Probably.
• In Excel: The value IS rolled up to the parent work items AFTER you select a remaining work cell. But it then overwrites the previous ‘remaining work’ values of the parent work items.
  • Expected behavior? Probably not.

Don’t get me wrong, I think its great that you can ‘roll up’ the remaining work numbers to the parent items. But should it overwrite data with those roll-ups? Should I have to select a cell to get those rolled up numbers?

Summary

Everything that I’ve seen so far is goodness. The team have done a great job so far. It’s awesome that we’re seeing this stuff before VS 2008 has even RTM’d. I’m looking forward to exploring the new requirements test coverage and manual “test runner” features. Stay tuned.