customize-work.md

title	titleSuffix	description	ms.technology	ms.prod	ms.assetid	ms.manager	ms.author	author	ms.topic	ms.date
Customize your work tracking experience	VSTS & TFS	Guide to configuring and customizing work tracking features in Visual Studio Team Services & Team Foundation Server	devops-agile	devops	D1B44480-F88B-4F35-927A-11ADFBCBAA23	douge	kaelli	KathrynEE	overview	03/20/2018

Customize your work tracking experience

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As you plan and track your project, you'll find you may want to configure a feature or customize your experience to meet your team's tracking needs. You configure teams and team Agile tools through the web portal administration context. The method you use to customize team projects, which impacts all teams, depends on the process model you use.

Customizations you make occur at one of three levels:

• Team assets or tools: Each team can customize or configure their specific tools, for details,see About teams and Agile tools
• Team project level: Add or modify work item types, data fields, backlog levels, and other objects shared across teams
• Object level: Grant or restrict access to work tracking tools, which includes setting permissions for objects and the team project and assigning users or groups to specific access levels.

Note

If you're new to the work tracking system, see Get started with Agile tools to plan and track work.

Shared resources

Each team project provides a number of shared resources that support all teams added to the project. You configure these features through the user interface or the admin context of the web portal. To understand how the system uses area and iteration paths, see About area and iteration paths.

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Area path pick lists	Sprint/iteration pick lists
Change the pick list of area paths to support grouping work items by team, product, or feature area.	Change the pick list of iteration paths to support grouping work into sprints, milestones, or other event-specific or time-related period. Activate sprints for each team.

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Shared queries	Tags
Open shared queries or create your own query using the query editor to list work items or show hierarchical or dependent items.<br/	Add tags to work items to filter backlogs and queries, or list items by tags

Team projects and process customizations

Your team project determines the objects available to tracking work and the configuration of Agile tools. Specifically, the team project determines the work item types (WITs)—user stories, tasks, bugs— and the data fields used to capture information. Customized objects are shared across teams added to the team project.

Note

The method you use to customize work tracking depends on the process model you subscribe to:

• Inheritance: Supports WSIWIG customization, available for VSTS only
• Hosted XML: Supports customization through import/export of process templates, available for VSTS only
• On-premises XML: Supports customization through import/export of XML definition files for work tracking objects

The following table summarizes the differences between the three supported process models. For definitions of the main work tracking objects, see Agile glossary.

Feature	[Inheritance](inheritance-process-model.md)	[Hosted XML](hosted-xml-process-model.md)	[On-premises XML](on-premises-xml-process-model.md)
WYSIWYG editing	
Create inherited custom processes	
Create custom process templates (see note 1)			
Inherit changes in system processes (Agile, Scrum, CMMI)	
Updated process changes automatically apply to team projects		
Basic customizations supported (fields, workflow, work item types, backlog levels)			
Advanced customizations supported (custom link types, global lists, global workflow, team fields)		(see note 2)	
Update Microsoft field mappings using the [**TFSFieldMapping**](reference/upload-or-download-the-microsoft-project-mapping-file.md) command-line tool			
Use the [**witadmin** command-line tools](reference/witadmin/witadmin-customize-and-manage-objects-for-tracking-work.md) to edit team projects			
Use the **witadmin** command-line tools to list information about team projects			
REST API (read)			
REST API (write)	

Notes:

1. A process determines the building blocks used to track work. A process template specifies an interdependent-related set of XML definition files that provide the building blocks and initial configuration for tracking work and other functional areas.
2. Hosted XML customization supports adding and updating global lists with a process update (subject to limits on maximum size of each list). To learn more, see Work tracking object limits.

Grant or restrict access to work tracking tools

You can grant or restrict access to select features and functions through the web portal. When you add user accounts to your team, they're automatically added to the Contributor group. They then have access to most of the features they'll need to contribute to code, work tracking, builds, and test. However, the Contributor group doesn't allow users to create shared queries or to add area or iteration paths. You have to grant these permissions separately.

For a simplified view of the most common, default permissions and access assignments, see Permissions and access. If you're new to managing permissions, see Permissions and groups reference, Inheritance.

Otherwise, to grant or restrict access to select features or functions, review one of these topics:

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Manage access	Permissions	Shared resources
- Add team members (VSTS) - Add team members (TFS) - Stakeholder access - VS Enterprise & Advanced access level	- Area path permissions - Process permissions - Work item query and folder permissions - Dashboard permissions - Plan permissions - Tagging permissions - Test permissions	- Alerts - Area paths - Iteration paths - Queries - Tags

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Customize the test experience

Several WITs support the test experience within the web portal Test hub and Test Manager client. You can customize these WITs as you would any other WIT. The following image illustrates the support link relationships.

See the following resources for additional usage and customization information:

• Test configurations and test variables
• Test resolution states (TFS)
• Failure types
• Define the initial test management configuration (process template)
• Query based on build and test integration fields

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Change the pick list for a person-name field

To add values for fields associated with user accounts such as Assigned To add users to a security group or by restricting access to a group or set of users. By default, the list for the Assigned To field contains the account names for all users and groups that have been added to the server. These accounts are often synchronized with Active Directory or Azure Active Directory. See Add AD/Azure AD users or groups to a built-in security group.

Less common customizations

You can only perform the following customizations when working with the Hosted XML or On-premises XML process models. The customizations made to process configuration apply to all teams added to the team project.

Backlog and board limits (Hosted XML, On-premises XML)

To limit the display load time to acceptable parameters, the task board is restricted to a maximum of 1000 work items. For details, see Process configuration XML element reference.

You can increase this value up to a maximum of 1500 by specifying a value for the workItemCountLimit attribute of the TaskBacklog element. For details, see Process configuration XML element reference.

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<TaskBacklog category="Microsoft.TaskCategory" pluralName="Tasks" singularName="Task" workItemCountLimit="800" >
    . . .
</TaskBacklog>

Change field assignments (Hosted XML, On-premises XML)

You can change the work item fields that are used in calculating capacity, burndown charts, forecasting, and velocity. Any change you make to one of the default assignments should correspond to a change made to the WIT used to define and capture information for that value.

For example, if you change the refname assigned to type="Activity" then you should include the same field in the WIT definition assigned to the Task Category which captures the activity information. For details, see Process configuration XML element reference.

The fields you assign are used by the following tools:

Tool	Field type
Task board, capacity tools, sprint burndown	Remaining work
Product and portfolio backlogs	Backlog priority
Velocity and forecast	Effort (maps to Story Points, Effort, or Size)
Task board, capacity tools	Remaining work
Capacity tools	Activity (Task Activity or Discipline)

Additional options

Do you want to customize your tools in a way that's not supported?

Here are a few options available to you:

• Check out Marketplace extensions to see if there's a tool available for your purposes
• Determine if a Service hook will satisfy your needs
• Create your own tool using REST APIs
• Add your feature request to our VSTS user voice page page.