How do I associate a review request with multiple changesets in TFS 2012

Question

Our development process works like this: Every 2 weeks the team lead (me) goes in and reviews everyone\'s changesets to make sure they are up to the coding standards. I would li

Answer 1

1. Unsolicited, no.
2. You can rightclick a changset in the history screen to request a review post checkin.

And there is a nasty workaround to get what you want to achieve. Check out all files you want to review and request a review. You can then undo your checkout, the shelveset and the review request will remain.

Alternatively you can just go to the source control tab and do a checkout-all on the rootfolder of your solution, request the review, undo your checkout and do the review.

As for linking changesets to a Work Item, this can be done post checkin. Open the work item, go to the links tab and click "Link to..." The dropdown there will have a "Changeset" option. But I don't think this link type is enabled for Code Review Requests, since these use a Shelveset and not a set of changesets as the source for the code to review.

I expect you could use the TFS API to generate a shelveset with all the changes from a specific developer in a given timerange, put these on a shelveset and request a review on that. But no existing feature to do that exists.

Or you might be able to edit the shelveset of associated to the review by creating a new one with the same name.

Answer 2

An alternative approach:

1) at the beginning of the two week cycle, initiate the code review process and note the work item number that is created. Simply request a review from yourself with no code changes at first.

2) Have all your developers associate their check ins for the next 2 weeks with that work item #

3) When you are ready to perform the review, simply open the work item and go through the changesets.

That should accomplish what you want.

Answer 3

Option #3

[I'm assuming here that the changesets that your are trying to associate to a single code review are consecutive, for example 20001:20010]

1. I "roll[ed] back to a specific changeset" (in my example above 20001). I check it in the changes. The code is now in its original state.

2. Then, I "roll[ed] back to a specific changeset" (in my example above 20010) and check it in again. The code is now in its final state.

3. Finally, I request a review on the latest revision. This review compares the latest two commits - the ones I created from the rollback.

As a bonus you can compare specific changesets in the history page. You can use this compare to make sure that the commits above did in fact revert the code to revision 20001 and 20010.

Answer 4

On item #2, I have a standard work around that you might like to combine all changes from many changesets into one shelveset for review. I tried the checkout method mentioned above and ran into issues, partly because my review had 25 files or so and after checking them out, if I refreshed, TFS removed them from pending changes because it TFS's opinion there were no changes.

First, (assuming that your changes are already checked in, and in multiple changesets), have a workspace with the latest files on a disk path such as D:\Latest...

Create a new "local" workspace (called "Review"), map the same project to the slightly different path (say, D:\Review...") get all the files. Go to the history of that project and just before your earliest changeset, right-click and select "Get this version".

At this point, go to the history and rollback any changesets that someone else may have changed in the meantime, if any, that you don't want to be part of the review, unless someone changed a common file. Leave those.

Using beyond compare, compare "D:\Latest..." to "D:\Review...", copy your changes from Latest to Review. Go into the common files and copy only the lines that you want reviewed. When Beyond Compare writes out the changes, TFS will detect the change and put the file you save in your pending changes list for the "Review" workspace. (That's a feature of local workspaces.)

At this point, you just shelve your pending changes from the "Review" workspace, and request a review on that shelveset.