Visual studio online query items without tags

Question

When are working with various Work Item types (user stories,Tasks, etc) we assign tags to reference the area of work. This makes it easy to filter the Backlogs items view to find any related stories.

I would like to build a query to identify Work Items where the tags have not yet been assigned.

I know this can be achieved using excel and filtering, however I specifically would like to do this using the queries. Is this possible??

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Answer 1

Firstly, I have to say that it is not possible to create work item query to show work items which don't contain tags. As you see that the Operator for Tags is Contains or Does Not Contain, it is not possible to use these two operators to filter out these non-tagged work items.

Secondly, as you have more than 100 tags, it is not an effective way to use "Does Not Contain" operator to exclude all tagged work items.

So,

How about you adding a 'Null' tag to all non-tagged work items to specify that these work items don't have any tags? With this approach, you can create a work item query with Tags Contains Null to list these non-tagged work items.

If you don't want to take this approach, you need to work with excel just as you mentioned above, or take Dave's advice to work with API.