Is It possible to write a TFS Query to get Actual Time Taken for a Tasks?

Question

I have been using TFS to track my backlog items and I am now trying to write a query to see how long I took on particular tasks in the last 7 days. So Far I have this query:

Work Item Type = Task

AND State = Done

AND Closed Date = @Today - 7

AND Area Path = @Project

AND Assigned To = @Me

and have added the column "Closed Date" which shows the time work stopped on this item. But I cannot get any information as to when work started on the Task

Feels like the data should be there as on particular tasks it has the following kind of information:

Is this possible? I don't mind extracting the data to Excel to analyse.

The reason I ask is because I would then like to go on to compare the amount of hours assigned to a particular task and compare it to amount of hours actually taken to help my predictions of time taken in future.

Solution 1

TFS is not intended to be a time tracking tool. You could query the work item history with the TFS API and check the timestamps on when the state transitions occurred if you really wanted to.

Agile projects don't focus on how long individual tasks take -- they focus on how much value the development team is providing over the course of a set period of time. One thing might be estimated low, one task might be estimated high, but it ultimately doesn't matter as long as the team delivers what they committed to deliver.

Solution 2

It's a pretty simple query actually. Here's what I'm using.

(Work Item Type = User Story
OR Work Item Type = Bug
)
AND State <> New
AND State <> Removed

Simply include the Activated Date, the Resolved Date, and the Closed Date in the displayed columns. The time between Activated and Closed is your total cycle time.

My team uses Resolved as a "pending deployment" status, so comparing Resolved to Closed allows us to determine how long it takes to get an item from "done" to "in prod".