Dogs Chasing Squirrels

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TFS Colorizer extension for Google Chrome

15

TFS Colorizer extension for Google Chrome

We use Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server at work.  It has a task board showing the development, testing, documentation, and other tasks that go into a release as cards in “Not Started”, “In Progress”, or “Done” columns.  The idea is to let you see the status of your project at a glance, but all the cards are the same color.  What’s the status of the release?  Are we waiting on development?  Testing?  UAT?  You can’t tell without reading every card title.  It would be better if, say, all development tasks were in green, all testing tasks were in orange, and all development tasks were in yellow.  Is the “Not Started” column filled with mostly green?  Yes?  Then we’re still waiting for development.  When we see the “Done” column filling up with green and the “In Progress” columns filling up with orange, we know we’ve entered the testing phase.  If you can colorize the cards on the board, you can see the status of your project at a glance.

That’s what this plugin does.  It lets you associate card colors with text contents.  If the card title starts with “Analysis” it’s red.  If it contains “Testing”, it’s orange, and so on.  It makes the TFS board far, far more useful.

Download the plugin here: TFS Colorizer

The code is up on github.

15 thoughts on “TFS Colorizer extension for Google Chrome

    1. Mike Bennett Post author

      It’s possible that it doesn’t. I’ve only tested on 2012. If you’re willing to do a “Save As” of your board, I could take a look. Let me know and I’ll email you at the address you provided here with where to send it.

    1. robsongdev

      it works for me, too. thank you so much.
      I am working in some improvements, like show the “id” on task card and minimize rows that all cards are “done”. Your extension is awesome. 😀

  1. Joe Abedi

    Is there anyway to add a color Code for a BLOCK or IMPEDIMENT? I would love to see these on the board in TFS. Currently as a workaround using the word Analysis as it is bright red.

      1. Dang

        One very convoluted way would be to establish a web service that takes in the id number of the ticket, which is exposed in the DOM, pass it along to the TFS api, get back data about the ticket and pass it back to the client. Then the client could apply the styling from there.

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