Handling bugs raised by customers in TFS

Question

I'm part of a team developing ASP.Net applications using Scrum. We currently use TFS for almost all aspects of our project management, source control, testing, and bug tracking.

However, there's a gap when it comes to customer-raised bugs. Bugs found internally are easy to add to TFS allowing us to link changesets to actual bugs. When bugs are found by customers though, we find ourselves using an externally-facing bug tracking system (JIRA at the moment) and manually entering the same bug in TFS. This results in duplication of effort and often a loss of detail in one or both systems.

I've been unable to find any integration tools between JIRA (or other bug trackers) and TFS, or a way of allowing customers to create TFS bugs directly.

How do you handle this? Are there any products or plugins that help this process?

Answer 1

For the customer related bugs, you can decide to use an external tracker or store those in TFS itself. I don't know JIRA in detail, so I cannot determine whether all features of JIRA are available in TFS, but I have used TFS succesfully for multiple customers as a Application Lifecycle Management tool, including the bug tracking.

All depends of course on the requirements you have on a bug tracking system. For customer facing bugs, the most important is that a customer can enter the information most preferrably in a simple web form in a tool that is free to use.

As for the cost, when you use Work Item Only View people can use TFS for free. For the simple entry there are several options:

1. A customer creates a bug by clicking on a URL. This URL prefills some fields of the bug work item like the assigned to, area and/or iteration.
2. To create a minimal bug form, you can create a web layout for the bug work item type. This is only workable if you don't need the full web layout yourself because you can only specify 1 layout for web.
3. You can decide to create a simple form / sharepoint list or anything that is useful for you and create new bugs with the TFS SDK in the background.

If you want to stay with JIRA, then you can use the TFS Integration Platform to synchronize the work items with JIRA.

Answer 2

Well there is Team Web Access but I don't think that is for external use, more info at "http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc668124.aspx"

I don't know JIRA, but if it has an api, you could create a web service and use the TFS api to create a work item. The if you needed to put info back TFS has Event subscriptions to push info back out.

links

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb130146%28VS.80%29.aspx

http://www.codeplex.com (not sure where it is but there is project on codeplex with sample for working with the api)

http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/2010/08/02/How-to-use-WCF-to-subscribe-to-the-TFS-2010-Event-Service-rolling-up-hours.aspx

http://mskold.blogspot.com/2010/02/upgrading-tfs-event-subscriptions-to.html

http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=330&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Answer 3

For almost every client project I work on we expose a queue through a set of services. Our app and customer portal both allow customers to make suggestions and report bugs. Crash reports are also auto published here. Since the individual who initiates the API call into TFS must have a CAL, we have someone in the office simply trigger a batch job that pulls everything into TFS. It's a one button push that anyone can hit any time of the day.

Key in my mind is reduce the barriers to submitting information. Bug and feedback should require as few entries as possible. We have one text box.