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Many of our customers record requirements in a formal document, and so do we for almost all our projects. In most cases Microsoft Office Word is used. To manage projects with the Team Foundation Server from requirements definition to delivery and maintenance, we wanted to be able to synchronize requirements written in Microsoft Office Word with the TFS requirement work items. So we developed the AIT Word-to-TFS extension.
The challenge of integrating a system A in a system B often consists in representing the options in system A within system B using the functions available in system B. In our case, A and B are defined as Microsoft Office Word and the TFS. We use a table structure as shown below to write requirements in MS Word:
This table structure has fields which contain all information on a requirement in a structured form. During synchronization, this information is transferred to the fields of a TFS requirement work item. Other content such as pictures is published as well. The following figure shows a requirement written and recorded in Word.
Behind the table structure there is an XML knot for structured and analyzable storage of the information within the Word document.
The corresponding requirement work item within Visual Studio is shown in the following figure:
Within Visual Studio the work items can be arranged in a hierarchy using AIT VSTS Extension:
At the moment, Word documents and the TFS can be synchronized using the command line with Word being the leading element. The synchronization was implemented as a command line tool to be able to automate the synchronization of specification documents and the TFS work item store in one Build Process.
With WordToTFS and VSTS Extension, we have closed the gap in the TFS 2008 and TFS 2010 requirements management.
