Today, I continue talking about TFS customization. This post covers the topic of customizing work items in TFS 2010. TFS customization provides for managing the appearance and functionality of fields in work item forms. Work item forms use fields to display data. These fields also enable users to input data and select options. You can use work item fields to track data for a work item type, to define the criteria for queries, and to design reports. You can use this TFS customization feature to support the following activities:

• Change the field label to match your team’s naming rules.
• Add or modify field’s values.
• Add fields to capture specific data.
• Define or customize a pick list.
• Replace a pick list with a global list to support cross-group consistency.

Before you use the TFS customization technique to add or modify a field, you might want to check whether you can use a field that has already been defined in the team project collection that contains your team project. It will also save you time to use a field that has already been defined in another project collection. Keep in mind, that you can have no more than 1,024 fields in each project collection and no more than 1,024 unique reportable fields in all project collections.

TFS customization is not going to be successful unless you apply a standard procedure to add and modify fields in process templates, team projects, and project collections. To keep consistency of your Team Projects, you should use systematic naming conventions when you label fields for reporting.

TFS customization of work items provides for adding work item fields or changing the attributes of existing fields to support reporting. Before you change or add fields, you have to make sure you don’t have these fields already defined in the project collections. When you add or change fields, you should name them systematically to make sure that data is logically grouped into folders in the SQL Server Analysis Services cube. Don’t forget that TFS customization should be applied to make your work easier and TFS reporting more accurate, not to cause schema conflicts in the warehouse.