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.