Announcing General Availability of Work item search

Discovering relevant work items should consume as little time and effort as possible. That’s why we have built work item search with speed and simplicity in mind, so you can spend more of your time on your work and less time searching for work items. Say hello to Work item search, now available by default with Visual Studio Team Services.

5/25: Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Work item search in Visual studio team services (VSTS).Work item search is a simple, fast and flexible search across all work items over all projects for a given account in Visual Studio Team Services. Not only can you perform full text matching, but Work item search also has rich support for in-line search filters on any work item field, thereby enabling users to quickly narrow down to relevant results. Please note that work item search is in progress for TFS 2017.

At the core of the offering, Work Item Search helps the users to solve the following problems:

Search across one or more projects
Search across all work item fields
Search in a specific work item field
Integrate with work item tracking

Search across one or more projects

Work Item Search enables you to search across all projects (in your account), so you can focus on the results that matter most to you. You can scope search and drill down into an area path of choice.

Search across all work item fields

You can use a free text search to easily search across all work item fields, including custom fields, which enables more natural searches. Search results are displayed in a snippet view where the search matches found are highlighted.

In free text search, you need not specify a target work item field to search against. Instead type the terms you recall and Work Item Search will match it against each work item field including title, description, tags, repro steps, etc. Matching terms across all work item fields enables users to search without having to recall any specific work item field information.

Search in a specific work item field

Work item search has support for rich inline search filters that let you refine work items in seconds. The drop-down list of suggestions helps complete your search faster. You can filter work items by specific criteria on any work item field. You can also incorporate logical operators such as AND, OR, NOT, to refine your query and get the results you want. For example, a search such as “a: Chris t: Bug s: Active” finds all active bugs assigned to a user named Chris.

Integrate with work item tracking

The Work Item Search interface also integrates with familiar controls in the Work hub, giving you the ability to view, edit, comment, share and much more.