Understand CMMI process template artifacts

TFS 2018

The CMMI process supports the following work item types (WITs) to plan and track work, tests, feedback, and code review. With different WITs you can track different types of work—such as requirements, change requests, tasks, bugs and more. These artifacts are created when you create a project using the CMMI process. They're based on the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) process.

Along with the WITs, teams have access to a set of work item queries to track information, analyze progress, and make decisions.

Plan and track work with CMMI

Teams plan their project by capturing features and requirements. When teams work in sprints, they define tasks and link them to requirements. To gain insight into a rollup of requirements across teams, program managers link requirements to a feature. Blocking issues are tracked using issues. For details on using these WITs, see CMMI process work item types and workflow

The following image shows the essential flow for getting started. For more information, see Get started with Agile tools to plan and track work.

Select one of the following images to go to the linked article.

List work items with queries

You can use work item queries to list work items based on their type, such as change requests, bugs, tasks, and requirements.

Or, use one of the shared queries that the CMMI process provides.

Descriptions of predefined queries are listed later in this article.

You can view and run queries from the web portal or from the Team Explorer plug-in to Visual Studio. You can also modify a query using the query editor to apply different filter criteria and add queries to team dashboards.

Tips for shared queries

Manage work more effectively with the following tips:

• Find work items assigned to you by adding @Me as the value for the Assigned To field in one of the query clauses.
• Modify any query by adding criteria to focus on a product area, an iteration, or another field. To modify a query, open the query editor.
• Open any query in Excel where you can update the fields of one or more work items and publish your changes to the database for tracking work items.
• Visualize status or progress by creating a pie-chart, column chart, or trend chart for flat-list queries.
• All valid users with standard access can create queries and folders under the My Queries area. To create queries and query folders under Shared Queries, you must have the Contribute permission set and have been assigned Basic access or greater. For more information, see Set permissions on queries.

Monitor progress

All processes—Agile, Scrum, and CMMI—support building status and trend charts and dashboards. Also, several charts are automatically built based on the Agile tools you use. These charts display within the web portal.

Create light-weight charts

You can define a shared flat query and create a chart based on your tracking interests. Chart types include status—pie, bar, column, stacked bar, and pivot—and trend—stacked area, line, and area—charts.

SQL Server reports

If your project collection and the project are configured with SQL Server Analysis Services and Reporting Services, you'll have access to many CMMI reports. For these reports to be useful, teams must do certain activities, such as define build processes, link work items, and update status or remaining work.

If you need to add reporting services or update reports to the latest versions, see Add reports to a project.

Related notes

• Create a project
• Add work items to manage a project
• Create a backlog
• Use a Kanban board
• Plan a sprint

CMMI process versions

As updates are made to the CMMI process template, the version number is updated. The following table provides a mapping of the versioning applied as updates are made to the Azure DevOps on-premises process templates. For Azure Boards, the latest version is always used. Each template provides a version element. This element specifies a major and minor version.

For a summary of updates made to process templates, see Release Notes for Azure DevOps Server.

More CMMI guidance

The situations and working practices of development teams vary widely, and most companies have their own well-established processes. For these reasons, the guidance given here doesn't attempt to prescribe a development process in full. Instead, we describe just the activities that are relevant to making best use of the CMMI process.

• Background to CMMI: Provides an overview of CMMI and the six capability levels that are intrinsic to the model.

• Project management: Provides guidance to help you better understand how to manage, plan, and coordinate the development and maintenance of software products working with the CMMI model.

• Engineering: Addresses the value-added activities for discovering the information that is required to design and build software products

Using the CMMI template and guidance can help you achieve the aims of CMMI if you use it as part of a process improvement program. Adapt this guidance to your own situation, which depends on the type and history of the product that you're developing, the project's scale, the background of the team members, and accepted practices in your organization.

This guidance was developed in partnership with David Anderson. For more information, see the following Web page: David J Anderson & Associates.

CMMI process predefined queries

Query for items assigned to you

You can find the work items that are assigned to you by using one of the shared queries that the following table describes.

Development and test queries

Team members can use the shared queries that are described in the following table to track the status of development and test tasks and active and resolved bugs.

Backlog management queries

Product owners can use the shared queries that are described in the following table to track the status of requirements and untriaged work.

Change management queries

Product owners can use the shared queries that are described in the following table to track change requests and dependencies that have been identified between change requests and requirements.

Troubleshooting queries

Product owners can use the shared queries that are described in the following table to troubleshoot issues and risks to the product schedule.