Field names when defining work item types in TFS - why this is important when you copy work items

When you have a work item and you want to relate in some manor to that work item when you create a new one (for example if you want to create a task that relates to a story or if you want to split a task into separate tasks or if you've registered a bug and realize that it's actually as designed and you want to create a story in stead.

You will soon learn that this is a common task if you keep the product backlog and the sprint backlog in TFS)

You can right click the work item in TFS (both in the query result view and the form) and select Create Copy of Work item. When doing so, you can select what type of work item you want the copy to be. So you can copy the bug details into a story or a task. This is really brilliant, but to make it really work well you need to consider what is being copied.

TFS tries to match the fields in the work item definition so if you copy from a bug to a new bug, all the fields are copied (well, not all like created date, but you get the picture). But if the work item types don't share any fields, nothing is copied. So this is worth taking into consideration when defining your work item types.