Article Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/charliemott
Tracking the count of TODO’s in your solution can be used for the following:
- Use as an additional measure of code quality.
- Predict estimated completion dates through use of a burndown chart.
- Once in production, TODO’s can be a good measure of how much Technical Debt lives within a solution.
As such, I have created a “FilesTextSearch” WF activity that can be plugged into a TFS build template. I’ve uploaded this as patch 13789 in the codeplex Community TFS Build Extensions project.
The default configuration of this activity is used to count TODO’s in the solution code.
- Search all directories below this base directory. - Comma separated list of file extensions to search. - List of strings to search (case insensitive).
This produces the following output in the build log:
Future Improvements
- Make use of the public OutArgument<int> MatchCount property. It could be used as additional data to support reporting requirements in order to produce a burndown chart.
TODO Formatting
See my post on recommendations for TODO formatting: http://geekswithblogs.net/charliemott/archive/2011/11/22/todo-formatting.aspx.