Tracing what is new in a given release for a product is often tiresome and time taking task. With Microsoft Release Management 2013 Update 3 RC/RTM, you can achieve this easily through its “Change Summary” feature. Details of this feature is described below

Change Summary feature details

Manual Release

When you start a new manual release from the Release Management client, it takes you to the Release page. Now, on this Release page, there is a new tab – Change Summary:

Click on the Change Summary tab and it shows you the list of work-items that are new or changed in the current release (in progress). This list is a relative list of work-items that are new / changed / implemented in the current release w.r.t. last successful release of the application:

You can also go to the already completed releases and you can see the Change Summary for each of these releases. 

The Change Summary shows Id, Type, Title, Owner and State of the work-items. Should you want to look at the individual work-items in more detail, you can do that by clicking on the Id field’s link which leads you to the work-item on TFS. 

Note: Change summary shows the work-item differences per Stage. So if you are looking at change summary on a given stage, it compares work-items with last successful release on that stage only and shows all the new / changed work-items since last release till the current release (in progress) for that stage.

Automated release (Continuous deployment process)

Many a time releases are triggered not manually but as part of continuous deployment process setup or through command line utility. In such cases, a Release Manager or a project manager or a Stage owner would like to view the Change Summary of work-items before approving/rejecting a release or any step in a release. For this, he/she need not come to the Release Management client but can do so through the Release Explorer (web client).

The Release explorer, now, contains an additional link for Change Summary which shows the list of new / changed work-items:

On clicking this you can see the work-items diff in the same way as on the Release Management client:

Feature limitations

• This feature is only available in the vNext deployment pipeline. To know more about vNext deployments, you can refer these articles:

• Deploying using PowerShell Desired State Configuration in Release Management

• How to setup environments for Agent-less deployments in Release Management 2013 with Update 3 RC
• How to deploy to Standard or Azure environments in Release Management 2013 with Update 3 RC

• How to trigger deployments to Chef managed environments from Release Management 2013 with Update 3 RC

• Currently the feature works when you use TFVC as source control. If you use Git, this feature would not be available.

• This feature can provide work-items across multiple branches if the same is reflected through the Source directories listed on the build definition.
• Work-items from child branches with FI and RI into the working branch would not be available
• When you choose “Build Externally” with components, work-items are not available as this information is not available in the builds of these components.