Friday, October 18, 2013

TFS 2012 and 2013: Changing bug WIT states breaks the ALM backlog and board with TF400917: The current configuration is not valid of this feature

Some teams have found the default bug states don't work well with their teams.  Moving to the Active, Resolved, Closed workflow for the bug WIT has been the most popular with those I have worked with.  I think part of this is because many teams (or their managers) are stuck in old-school waterfall mode while trying to claim they are embracing SCRUM or AGILE.

Either way if you change the BUG states from the default for the SCRUM or AGILE process template you will find the Backlog and board pages on web view for TFS 2012 or 2013 will break.  If you revert your WIT change the ALM features will work again. 

Broken ALM features will show: TF400917: The current configuration is not valid of this feature.  This feature cannot be used until you correct the configuration.

The link to the "Learn more about configuring features" page will take you to MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/jj159364.aspx) which does not have any info on this. 

http://blog.nwcadence.com/configure-features-in-team-foundation-server-2013/ has good info on how to setup the features if they never were setup before.  But in our situation it use to work and is now BROKE!

So what's up?
A few posts will tell you to use
witadmin exportcommonprocessconfig then
witadmin importcommonprocessconfig without making any change to the .xml from the export. 

This will result in an error tf400536.  It will say the "requirementworkitems" entries are wrong. 

So how the hell do you fix it?

You need to run
  1. witadmin exportcategories /p:<PROJECT> /collection:<URL TO TPC> /f:catagories.xml
  2. Edit the file and remove <WORKITEMTYPE name="Bug" /> from <CATEGORY refname="Microsoft.RequirementCategory" name="Requirement Category">
  3. witadmin importcategories /p:<PROJECT> /collection:<URL TO TPC> /f:catagories.xml

 

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