Business Rules for Work Items in Team Services

For inherited process model in VSTS, you can use Custom Rules to define rules that can clear the value of a field, copy a value into a field, and apply values based on dependencies between different fields' etc. You can define actions against conditions using custom rules. This provide you the flexibility in VSTS to go beyond the level of setting a default value or making a field required. To customize work items in an existing team project of Hosted XML model for VSTS, or on-premises TFS, you have to customize, downloaded process template or individual work item XML files (using witadmin tool) respectively. Differences between process models are described here.

Let’s look at how we can use the custom rules in inherited process template. In your inherited process template you can go to a given work item type, by clicking on the name of it as described in here. Then you can see a tab Rules, where you can define the custom rules for the work item type.

You can define a rule such as, “when the Task work item state is New, what ever the value you enter in Original Estimate field should be copied to Remaining Work field”, as shown below.

When you are setting the value of Original estimate field it will auto apply to the remaining work field, of task work item for the team projects that you are using the inherited template.

At present there are some limitations in defining custom rules. You can use only maximum of two conditions with an AND clause. There is no OR condition. And conditions are limited to predefined set of condition types.

But this is awesome flexibility for VSTS templates and this will get more improvements in future hopefully.