witAdmin: Customize and manage objects for tracking work

Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server | Azure DevOps Server 2022 | Azure DevOps Server 2020

You can change how you track your team's progress by creating and customizing objects that track work items. By using the witadmin command-line tool, you can create, delete, import, and export objects such as categories, global lists, global workflow, types of links, and types of work items. You can also delete, list, or change the attributes of work item fields.

As the following illustration shows, you manage categories and types of and work items for each project. You manage global lists, types of links, and fields in work item for each project collection. You can customize global workflow for a project or a collection.

For most commands, be a member of the Project Administrators or Project Collection Administrators groups. For more information, see Change project collection-level permissions.

Run the witadmin command-line tool

To run the witadmin command-line tool, open a Command Prompt window where Visual Studio is installed. The witadmin command-line tool installs with any version of Visual Studio. You can access this tool by installing the free version of Visual Studio Community or Visual Studio Team Explorer.

For Visual Studio 2022

%programfiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer

or Professional or Enterprise in place of Community, depending on the version you installed.

For Visual Studio 2019

%programfiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer

or Professional or Enterprise in place of Community, depending on the version you installed.

For Visual Studio 2017

%programfiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer

or TeamExplorer or Professional in place of Enterprise, depending on the version you installed.

On a 32-bit edition of Windows, replace %programfiles(x86)% with %programfiles%. You can install Visual Studio Community (which provides access to Team Explorer) or Visual Studio Team Explorer 2017 for free.

Global parameters

You can use the following parameters to display help text for witadmin.

XML definition files

You customize all work tracking objects—such as, work item types, process configuration, global lists—by updating their XML definitions. If you're new to work tracking customization, see Customize your work tracking experience.

You run witadmin commands against Azure DevOps Services or an on-premises Azure DevOps Server. As shown in the following command lists, only witadmin commands that list or export files are supported for the Azure DevOps Services.

Work item types

Work items are used to track anything you need to track. Each work item is based on a work item type. Each work item type defines the fields available in which to store information. The available work item types depend on the process you used when your project was created (Agile, Scrum, Basic, or CMMI). For more information, see Track your work items in Azure Boards user stories, issues, bugs, features, and epics.

For the Inherited process model, you can add and delete work item types from the web portal. For more information, see Add and manage work item types (Inheritance process).

Fields

Fields are used to track the status and information associated with work items. Fields are defined for an organization or collection. For more information, see Work item fields and attributes. To look up the description of a specific field, see Field descriptions for default and work item fields used in process templates.

For the Inherited process model, you can view and delete fields from the web portal. For more information, see Add and manage fields (Inheritance process).

Categories

Categories associate one or more work item types as belonging to the same category. Azure Boards relies on default category definitions, many of which specify a single work item type per category. For more information, see Use categories to group work item types.

Link types

Use different link types to manage the various relationships between work items. For On-premises XML and Hosted XML process models, you can define custom link types. For more information, see Link work items to other objects and Reference guide for link types.

Global lists

Global lists are pick lists that you can include within one or more fields and work item type definitions. You can share list items among several work item types for a collection of projects by including the list items in one or more GLOBALLIST elements. For more information, see GLOBALLIST XML element reference.

Process configuration

Process configuration defines the default configuration and functional capabilities that your teams can access using Azure Boards. The configuration determines the work item types that appear on the product backlog, sprint backlogs, boards, and Taskboards. For more information about process configuration and what you can customize, see Process Configuration.

For the Inherited process model, you can customize backlogs from the web portal. For more information, see Customize your backlogs or boards (Inheritance process).

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