TFS and VS2010: Approve edits to particular project

Question

Our team's project solution has several individual projects associated with it, one of which is designed to serve as an underlying framework for our application layer -- call it "FrameworkProject". Only in rare cases should the code for this project be edited, and in these cases I would like to be able to approve the changes to the code. Is there a TFS capability that would allow me to achieve this?

We're using VS2010 and TFS2010.

Answer 1

You have several options:

1. Implement a custom check in policy and work item type. TFS Code
   Review Workflow
2. Look at Team Review
3. Implement a process that enforces that any changes must be shelve-set first allowing for a code review. Once the review has
   taken place then based on permission the allowed member checks the
   code into the Project.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Here are a few other options:

1. You can use check-in locks to prevent check-ins. You can do this by locking the top-level directory that you want to protect. Now, if someone tries to check-in, the check-in will fail and you will need to have an internal process where you review the change, temporarily unlock the folder and allow the check-in to proceed.
2. You could probably implement a gated check-in workflow that would send an email to you when a check-in was submitted to the given paths. From there you could have some approval process that would allow the gated check-in to complete.

Answer 3

You may create a "working" branch of your framework and revoke checkin rights from the main branch for everyone except the reviewers. When someone needs to do a change, he has to change the working branch and a reviewer then has to merge the changes to the main branch in this step he will review all changes using his preferred diff tool on the mergeset before checkin in. He may revoke the merge and request fixes by simply undoing his working copy and optionally checking in review comments into the working branch.