This post is part of a series of blogs describing how to modify the process template MIcrosoft MSF 5 Agile to activate the advance features available with Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template.

“Out of the box” with any project using the new Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template, Urban Turtle provide a feature for story approval.

However, if your project is using another process template such as MIcrosoft MSF 5 Agile the approval feature is not activated. This post is a walk through describing how to activate this feature.

Approval

The approval feature is a transition helper, allowing user to click on a button to change the state of a work item. Some templates do not contain this concept because the functional items (user story, bugs…) are active just after creation. To be able to approve a work item with Urban Turtle, you have to:
·      Add a “Non-approved” state to the functional items

·      Create a transition from the non-approved state to the active state

·      Edit your Urban Turtle configuration to specify the approval transition
Adding a state to a work item type could easily be done with the help of the Process Editor which is part of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools.

The Team Foundation Power Tools are available at this url:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c255a1e4-04ba-4f68-8f4e-cd473d6b971f

After installation, Visual Studio 2010 has a new menu item in the Tools section. This tool will allow us to update the work item type definition of our project directly from the server.
Select the menu : Tools >> Process Editor >> Work Items Types >>Open WIT from Server

A dialog box appears, navigate through your project collections and project to open the work item type definition.

In this example, I have chosen to edit the User Story work item. Select the work item type and click OK.

The work item type definition file should now be loaded in Visual Studio. The editor contains 3 tabs: Fields, Layout and Workflow.

To add a new state, select the Workflow tab. The workflow editor is a visual designer where each red box is a state linked to others states by transitions (blue arrows).

The specific tool box will help you to change the work item type workflow.

Just drag and drop a new State box in the diagram and name it Proposed. You can edit the name of a state box by double clicking the current name box.

You now have to create the transitions from the creation to Proposed and from the Proposed state to the Active state. Just select the incoming transition already present in the Active state and press Del to delete it. We will replace the creation transition to our new Approved state.

Select the transition link tool in the toolbox and drag a link from an empty space (not from a state box) to the Approved state box. Double click the transition to edit it.

Select the Reasons tab and add a reason named Created.

Again, add a transition link between the Approved state box and the Active state box with a reason called Approved.

Save your changes by clicking the save button in the Visual Studio toolbar. You can now test your new work item types definitions by creating a new User Story.

Now that you have the required state in the type definition workflow, you just have to configure Urban Turtle to take advantages of it. On the Team Foundation Server Application Tier, find and edit the Urban Turtle configuration mapping file from your updated process template. In this example, we will update the MSF Agile 5.xml file located at:

%TFS INSTALL DIR%\Application Tier\Web Access\Web\UrbanTurtle\configuration\project

We highly recommend you to make a copy of this file.

Add a new element in the Features Section, defining the approval action for a User Story work item type as a transition from the Proposed to Active state.

Finally, you will have to apply this new configuration file to your existing project in Urban Turtle. To do so, connect to your project in Urban Turtle and select Project >> Configuration in the urban turtle toolbar.

Select the updated configuration file (in this example the MSF 5 agile) and click Apply.

To test the feature, create a new user story in the updated team project and verify that the initial state is equal to Proposed.

Save and close the editor to return to the planning board. In the planning board, the user story now has a new button at the right of the list item that allows users to approve the story.

If you click on this button, the user story will automatically pass from the state Proposed to Active.

In the next article, we will configure our projet in order to activate the recycle bin feature.