Behavior

Process behavior defines preconditions and follow-up actions for individual operations. This behavior encourages or enforces process rules for your project and your teams. Behavior is defined in the project's process configuration and can be customized by team areas.

Preconditions and follow-up actions are applied in the context of an operation. For example, for the Work Item Save operation, you can use a precondition to define which fields in a work item must be filled in before it can be saved. If a required field is incomplete, then the save operation is blocked and details are provided in the Team Advisor view and in the title bar of the work item. The following figure provides an example of a precondition that must be met before delivering code to source control.

Figure 1. Precondition alerts are displayed in the Team Advisor view
This picture shows an alert in the Team Advisor view. A deliver operation has failed, and the alert tells the user that the operation failed because they failed to associate a work item with the change set.

Follow-up actions can make additional changes to artifacts in the repository after an operation is successfully completed, as defined by the process. For example, The Scrum process currently generates three work items in response to the operation of joining a team: Create a Repository Workspace, Find Your Work Items, and Set Up Instant Messaging.

Jazz™ process templates include a collection of process operations with preconditions and follow-up actions. The predefined operations vary in the different process templates. The table below shows operations in the Scrum process template, as an example; some of these operations are common to all predefined process templates.

Table 1. Predefined operations, preconditions, and follow-up actions in the Scrum process template
Operation Precondition/Follow-up action Comments
Generate Team Invitation Create initial work items This follow-up action creates a set of work items for the tasks you need to perform to complete the process of joining the team.
Accept Team Invitation Show work items When you accept the invitation to join the team, a query is run to display your assigned work items.
Work Item Save Operation Required properties Team members are advised to complete certain fields in work items before they can be saved.
Source Control Deliver Operation Descriptive change sets Team members are advised to associate a work item with every code delivery.
 
 

The process configuration where behavior is defined is available in the Project Area editor. Open the configuration by clicking the Process Configuration tab. Operation behavior that applies to a role across the entire project is specified in the Process Configuration section. Operation behavior that applies to roles at the team area level is specified in the Team Configuration section.

Process permissions and behavior are configured independently. Your team can choose to customize only an operation's permissions, only the behavior, or both.

Process permissions and behavior can be shared across multiple iterations and timelines, and they can be configured at any level of the team configuration. The process framework uses the permissions and behavior configured for the most specific iteration. For example, if your team defines behavior at the top level, that behavior applies for all iterations. But if your team then adds a reference to a specific iteration and configures the behavior for that iteration, this behavior is used when that iteration is current.


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