Is it possible to link a work item to a release?

Question

We would like to link a TFS work item to a Release so we can easily, with one click from the Release, open a TFS item that contains more info about this release. Info like Release Notes etc.

Is it possible? A release has these variables that can be set when the release is created but they won't hold a (clickable link).

Answer 1

We cannot link work items for an existing release for now, there's already a user voice submitted here to suggest the feature, you can go and vote it up or submit a new one to achieve that in future release.

However you can link work items from changeset, try below steps:

1. Associate the work items to a changeset when you check in the changes

2. Then enable Automatically link new work in this build under Option in the build pipeline. Thus when a build completes successfully, it will create links to all work items linked to associated changes. See Automatic linking work items to builds for details.

3. Create a release pipeline and set the build which created in step2 as the artifacts source (For CI/CD).

   You can also enable Report deployment status to Work for the stages under Option in the release pipeline (For set the repository as artifacts source ), thus when the stage completes, it will create links to all work items linked to associated changes.

Please note that in the release summary, it compares the current release with the previous release and then displays the newly added work items associated with changesets. So if you create two releases with the same artifacts source, then the second release will not include the work items... You can reference this thread for details: In TFS 2018, how do I get linked work items to show up in a release?