Exploring Work Item Charting in Team Foundation Server 2013

Work Item Charting allows you to use a browser based interface to create visual chart representations of the data returned from a TFS query. This allows us to build up a view of visual representations of work item data that help us understand the state of our projects better in a simple to use way

To get started with our charting the first thing you need is to use the connect to your TFS project via web access and head to the Work Items section and add a new Work Item Query:
In my example I have the simplest of queries (the default), of course you can modify this query to mine out the work item data-set that you want to work with:

In my instance I will leave the default query in place and add no additional clauses. This query by default returns me all the work items in my project (denoted by the @Project syntax) that are of [Any] Work Item Type (Features, PBIs, Tasks, Bugs etc...) and are in [Any] State (New, In Progress, Done etc...). With this simple query in place I can simply save my query using the “Save As…” icon to give my new query a sensible name like “All Work Items”.

Now I have my query you can see in the above diagram (albeit truncated) that a result set is returned based on the query. This now provides us with the basis from which we can start “Work Item Charting” by moving to the “Charts” tab and selecting “New Chart”: