What are the drawbacks to merging the Task and Bug Work Items and only use one of them in TFS 2010?

Question

I was thinking that I’d rather only use the Task Work Item and ignore the Bug Work Item. This is my thinking as I set things up for my team. I’m on a quest to see why I shouldn’t do this. From my perspective a Task is either a new item or a bug item. There is no need to use two distinct Work Item Types. To make this happen in TFS I’ll start with the Bug Work Item and create a custom field (“Item Type”) to distinguish the two task types: new/bug. Both new tasks and bugs will share the same fields. Anyone see any major drawbacks to this approach?

Answer 1

I would suggest keeping Bug and dropping Task if you want to merge them. By default when you check in code and Resolve with a bug, it sets the status to Resolved and assigns it to whoever created it - usually a tester, but in your case possibly a PM. That person can then test to confirm the work is done and close it. You can set up alerts on their work items so they get an email and know that progress has happened. Alternatively if you use Task, when you Resolve at check in it is just closed. No alerts, no further testing. YMMV but we on some of our projects we use Bug for things like "user would like to add a new report" and it fits our process well. (For others we keep the distinction for reporting purposes.)