Associating change sets with work items

Many team processes use work items as a way to assign work to team members, and require that a change set be associated with a work item before it can be delivered. The association between a change set and a work item provides a way to let your team know the reasons for a change, its dependencies, and the level of review that it has had.

About this task

Associating a change set with a work item collects all of the changes required to resolve the work item in one place so that they can be examined or accepted into workspaces for review and testing. You can associate a change set with a work item before or after the change set is completed.

Change sets are visible in the Pending Changes view. This view lists all of your repository workspaces. A message in the view's message area indicates how many change sets are pending, and what kind they are. To see individual change sets, click the Expand to Change sets toolbar icon Expand to show change sets icon .

If you have designated a work item as the active work item, it is automatically associated with the current change set. For more information, see Working on a work item.

To associate a work item with a change set or break an existing association between a work item and a change set:

Procedure

Right-click the change set and click Associate Work Item to display the Select Work Items window. By default, the Select Work Items window lists the work items that you have opened most recently. You can search for other work items, or create a new one.
Select one or more work items from the list and click OK to compete the association.

What to do next

Note: To remove the association between a work item and a change set, expand the change set to display the work items, then right-click the work item and click Remove.