Team System, Project and Work Items

I've got a semi complicated solution that I'd like to implement in Team System for our current business.

We develop small pieces of software who's development follows a relatively common process. For each new development there are a number of tasks which remain static such as order hardware, set up hardware blah blah. We also follow a relatively fluid software development process which in some cases is obviously dependent on availability of hardware, nothing new here again.

What I'd like to do is using Team System and Project is be able to automate as much of the red tape of this as possible. An example:

We kick off a new mini project and begin capturing our requirements. At the kick off point I want to be able to create a new instance of Work Item type Mini Project which is already set up with the states of our software development process. When the new Work Item is created I want this action to automatically generate a number of other Work Items (simple tasks that have states of Active and Completed) for me. These small tasks should be linked to the main Mini Project Work Item type specified above. Then I want to be able to open MS Project, sync the latest tasks, update the scheduling information, resources and predecessors and updates the work item types.

So after all this firstly:

Is it possible to automatically generate a number of work items after creating one 'parent' work item

Secondly:

Could I populate a field off these automatically generated work items automatically with the name of the mini-project so that I can easily group them in MS Project

Few got there in the end, thanks in adavance for any help/comments

Hi Stuart,

I do not believe there is a way to do this natively in the tool. However, you should be able to write some code against the Work Item Tracking object model to do this.