Best Practices for hotfix process?
Hi,
I'm looking for some guidelines on how to apply a hoxfix to a project. Basically we have multiple streams teams work on. Lets call them 'Dev Stream' and 'Hoxfix Stream'. Originally, they both come from a 'Release stream'. The dev team works on the 'Dev Stream', creating multiple change sets associated to work items, and some of these need to be delivered as part of a hotfix. Once all the work items have been completed (with corresponding change sets), the Hotfix team takes a look at these and decides which will be part of the hotfix. They then accept these changes into their 'Hotfix' steam. I have found 2 ways of doing this: Pros: One click delivery of all change sets via Links tab this new 'Hotfix 1' work item. Cons: Looking through the change sets via the search tool is painful when you have hundreds of change sets. Ctrl + clicking each one of them individually works fine until a certain point - then it's unmanageable. Also, since the change sets are renamed to match this new work item, I have not found direct traceability to the original work items. For now, I can right click on a change set (within the links tab in the work item) and select 'Remove Work Items' and the original work item will show up. Pros: Very good traceability with this Parent - Child relationship. Cons: From the parent Work Item, I have found no way of accepting all of the change sets associated to the childs. I have to open the child work items individually and accept changes that way. Perhaps there's a way to accept all change sets with one click? My main concern here is that there might be an easier way of doing this, and I don't know about it. Perhaps something already designed for hotfixes like these. Since I can edit work item categories, would it be possible to accept all change sets from work items destined to a specific category? (Filed against field) Perhaps add an attribute to work items (e.g a Hotfix field) and then write a script to query work items that have this field? Thanks for any advice/suggestions! |
2 answers
david987 wrote:
Once all the work items have been completed (with I suspect that you will disagree with me, but I think that is where your process goes wrong. A separate hot fix team can't be the ones to identify the change sets that need to go into a hot fix. The original developers need to do that. A separate hot fix team will get it right in the simple cases. But the developers can do a better job with the complex cases, such as when the change set is built on top of another change set that is not supposed to go into the hot fix (in which case the change needs to be recreated in a brand new new change set). A hot fix team can oversee the process and select the work items to be in the hot fix, but I think the developers who fixed the original work items should be the ones to get the changes into the hot fix stream. Also, since the change sets are renamed to match this new work item, I Change sets can be associated with multiple work items. It should be possible to associate the change set with both the original work item and the hot fix work item. RTC will display only one of the work items in the change set summary, but both work items will be listed there if you expand the change set. (At least in some views. Other views don't show the work items associated with a change set.) |
To simplify the question a bit:
What is the best way to filter and accept multiple change sets at once: 1) Is there a way to query for change sets based on associated WorkItem's parameter? (maybe a version number or hotfix number field) 2) Is there a way to query for change sets based on WorkItem's parent? (if all the workitems for a "hotfix" were linked to a parent work item) - Once these queries return a list of change sets / work items, we should then be able to accept all changes. Thanks in advance for your help. -Saurabh |
Your answer
Dashboards and work items are no longer publicly available, so some links may be invalid. We now provide similar information through other means. Learn more here.