Both the MSF Agile and Scrum for Team System templates define the “Assigned To” list (“System.AssignedTo”) as:
<FIELD reportable=“dimension“ type=“String“ name=“Assigned To“ refname=“System.AssignedTo“>
<VALIDUSER/>
FIELD>
<VALIDUSER/>
FIELD>
The problem with that is that the list displays every user in your domain. I wanted to change that behavior since not every user in the domain uses TFS, plus we had some service accounts that didn’t need to get anything assigned to them, so this is how you would change it:
<FIELD reportable=“dimension“ type=“String“ name=“Assigned To“ refname=“System.AssignedTo“>
<ALLOWEDVALUES filteritems=“excludegroups“>
<LISTITEM value=“[Project]\Project Administrators“ />
<LISTITEM value=“[Project]\Contributors“ />
ALLOWEDVALUES>
FIELD>
<ALLOWEDVALUES filteritems=“excludegroups“>
<LISTITEM value=“[Project]\Project Administrators“ />
<LISTITEM value=“[Project]\Contributors“ />
ALLOWEDVALUES>
FIELD>
The list will contain all users in the current project’s “Project Administrators” and “Contributors” groups, excluding any group names. You can also make that change through the Power Tools Process Editor.
Mark Allen
Another approach which works well is to have the XML tag reference a custom TFS group. In my case there is a master contributor group shared between projects so rather than list all the contributor users in the template AssignedTo list boxes I created a TFS group called ‘TeamAssignments’ and within security I referenced the team. Then in the templates I added the tag ListItem value=[project]\TeamAssignments. Now when anyone is added to the team they are displayed in the AssignedTo List box. This also means that another team can be created without changing the templates as the changes can be done in security.
TFS Team Name: Blue (example set up in security)
TFS Group Name: TeamAssignments
Members: Team Blue