Azure DevOps Default Enabled Alert/Notification - Which Can be a Nightmare for an Admin

As an admin of an Azure DevOps account you may be creating sample environments to simulate production behaviors, before applying any process changes to a Team project. In this case your choice would be to create a new team project and try out a simulation first. However, you might want to do the simulation with close to production data, so you will try to find a mechanism to make a copy of work items etc. from your production to a simulation Team project. How to do this with various options available is not the discussion today (which we can discuss in another post), as this post  is to show you an alert that must be turned off, before you do any sort of work item data duplication as a bulk, to avoid spam emails to many users of your Azure DevOps account. A lesson learnt the hard way is shared with you to prevent you from falling to same pitfall.

Experiment on Limit AssignedTo field of WIT to Team Members

A question in MSDN Forum lead me to do some experiments on restricting AssignedTo field of a work item to Team Members.

Here are some notes

1. I created team project CustomizeTest
2. This created default team "CustomizeTest"
3. I tried modifying Bug WIT template AssignedTo field

<ALLOWEDVALUES expanditems="true" filteritems="excludegroups">
    <LISTITEM value="[project]\CustomizeTest" />
  </ALLOWEDVALUES>

TFS template was not imported. Error
Error importing work item type definition:
TF26204: The account you entered is not recognized. Contact your Team Foundation Server administrator to add your account.
4. Created a new team "Team1" and tried with

<ALLOWEDVALUES expanditems="true" filteritems="excludegroups">
    <LISTITEM value="[project]\Team1" />
  </ALLOWEDVALUES>

Wow it works fine.
5. So where did I go wrong.... Got it... The default team of team project "CustomizeTest" is created as "CustomizeTest Team"

<ALLOWEDVALUES expanditems="true" filteritems="excludegroups">
    <LISTITEM value="[project]\CustomizeTest Team" />
  </ALLOWEDVALUES>

Works fine.
OK That is that and it works...BUT

Another experiment notes

1. I assigned one member to my Team1
2. Customized Bug WIT AssignedTo field to have

<ALLOWEDVALUES expanditems="true" filteritems="excludegroups">
    <LISTITEM value="[project]\Team1" />
  </ALLOWEDVALUES>

3. Went into Team project CustomizeTest\Team1 and tried creating Bug. Assigned To field drop down have only one member. yeah I am happy.
4. Went into root team project CutomizeTest (CustomizeTest Team) Create Bug. AssignedTo field only has that one member in Team1. Ok it should be since I have made it to work like that.  (my CutomizeTest Team has 3 Members but I can assign a bug in this team only to one member of the Team1, looks like I made some bad customization)
5. I created another Team "Team2" with 2 members.  and modified my Bug WIT AssignedTo field to have

<ALLOWEDVALUES expanditems="true" filteritems="excludegroups">
    <LISTITEM value="[project]\Team2" />
  </ALLOWEDVALUES>

Now when I go into "CustomizeTest Team", "Team1" and "Team2". Create a bug I can assign it to only to the two members of the "Team2".
6. I changed my Bug WIT AssignedTo field to

<ALLOWEDVALUES expanditems="true" filteritems="excludegroups">
    <LISTITEM value="[project]\Contributors" />
  </ALLOWEDVALUES>

and I added teams "CustomizeTest Team", "Team1" and "Team2" as members of [project]\Contributors.
This lists all members from the three teams in my AssignedTo field regardless of the team I am in.
Think all above my experiments will help someone in some way.

If there is  a way to say <LISTITEM value="[project]\<TheCurrentTeam>" /> which would be wonderful to have I think.