Friday, October 16, 2009

TFS – Work Item Manager

I was searching for a better taskboard to use with Team Foundation Server (TFS) than the one that comes canned with the Scrum for Team System (SFTS) template (which is a static report) and I came across the Work Item Manager.

In one word – its AWESOME!!!!

Work Item Manager is a beta product from Telerik and it does much, much more than just being an interactive task-board (which it does very well). Apart from the task-board, it provides so much more functionality that in some ways it comes close to becoming a replacement for Team Explorer (although it runs on top of Team-Explorer and so you do need to have TeamExplorer installed on your machine).

The task-board not only allows you to review the different states in which your work-items are in, but also allows you to change state by dragging and dropping them in a different state swim-lane. You can add work-items, review work-items, filter them and a whole lot more. Another cool feature is the Project Dashboard, a constantly updating screen of project information – a great way to get a quick overview of the project.

The WIM is a very cool project and you should take a look at the video that Telerik has made demoing all its features. (video)

tb Task-board sample.

Telerik Work Item Manager

1 comment:

Martin L. Shoemaker said...

Thanks! It's good to see an outsider's perspective on tools like this, as a complement to their marketing material.