Address inaccuracies published for summary values

TFS 2017 | TFS 2015 | TFS 2013

If you see that hours are counted twice in reports that contain task hours, you can correct the problem with the procedure in this article. The Progress dashboard and the Burndown and Burn Rate and Remaining Work reports may show double-counting of work hours.

Note

When you use Office Project to create parent and child tasks, it assigns parent tasks the rollup of hours that are defined for all its child tasks. Rollup hours are not published to Team Foundation so that the hours are not double-counted in certain reports. The Microsoft Project mapping file attribute, IfSummaryRefreshOnly, suppresses the publication to Team Foundation of the hours that are assigned to summary tasks. You can view the rollup of hours for summary tasks in Office Project but not in Team Foundation. For more information, see Customize the Microsoft Project field mapping file.

When both summary tasks and their child tasks contain hours in the effort fields, you essentially have a double-counting of the level of effort a task requires. To address these inaccuracies, you must clear the Original Estimate (or Baseline Work for team projects that have been upgraded), Remaining Work, and Completed Work fields for the summary or parent tasks.

Prerequisites

To address inaccuracies, you must be a member of the Contributors group or your View work items in this node and Edit work items in this node permissions must be set to Allow.

Clear the hour fields of parent or summary tasks

  1. In Team Explorer, expand the Work Items node for your team project, and locate the Work Items with Summary Values team query.

    This query is located either in the Team Queries folder or the Planning and Tracking folder under the Team Queries folder.

  2. Run the query.

  3. Select Collapse all (Collapse All) so that only parent or summary work items appear in the query results.

  4. Press CTRL+A to highlight the parent work items that are listed.

  5. Open the context menu for one of the work items, and then choose Open in Microsoft ExcelOpen in Microsoft Excel.

    Important

    Export the query results to Office Excel with the rows collapsed. This condition exports only the parent or summary tasks.

  6. In the Excel document, for the area and iteration paths that you're managing, clear the values in the following three columns:

    • Original Estimate
    • Remaining Work
    • Completed Work
  7. (Optional) Save the Excel file.

    Note

    The work items in this list are based on the work item IDs and not a work item query. To address inaccuracies that may occur later, you must repeat steps 1 through 6.

  8. On the Team tab, choose Publish.

  9. Wait two or more hours for the Analysis Services cube to register the changes.

    The default refresh frequency for the relational data warehouse is two minutes, and for the cube, two hours. For more information, see Change a process control setting for the data warehouse or Analysis Services cube.

  10. Verify that the changes have been picked up by viewing the Progress dashboard or other work report.