How to take ownership of a code review task?

Question

Using TFS 2013 and Visual Studio 2013 Premium Preview is it possible to take ownership of another person's code review task?

The situation I have is that another developer has requested a code review and then gone on holiday. The code review has been performed and updates are required to the code in light of the review comments. I would like to action the review comments myself before the original developer returns from holiday, but I can't find a way to assign the code review task to myself like I can do with any other work item.

Obviously I could simply look at the code review comments and action them anyway, but I would have to remember to explain all of this to the returning developer so that they close the review appropriately. It would be so much nicer to be to assign the code review task to myself and action the comments as if I had requested the review in the first place.

Severance

Did you find a solution for this yet? Even with VS 2015 it seems that this is not possible. – Feretory

@Feretory Unfortunately we didn't find a proper solution. I simply worked around it as outline in my original question. – Severance

Answer 1

You should be able to create a new work item query and find the Code Review Request/Response work items and then change the Assigned To field to the appropriate person. Have you tried that route yet? All of the code review workflow items are simply work items in TFS. You get all of the normal benefits of work items!

Hilary

Unfortunately this is not possible. Neither the Code Review Request work item nor the Code Review Response are editable. All fields are greyed out. The only thing what you can edit on those work items is the Tags and the Links. Same is with VS 2015, btw. I have the same issue and did not find a solution for it yet. – Feretory

@Feretory - You can click the "Open in Excel" button when viewing the workitem, make the edits, then publish the changes. Its kludgey (and sensitive), but works. – Sentimentalize

@StingyJack. Amazing. This just saved me after some corruption of the the assigned to fields in code review items after upgrading to TFS 2015. – Cymogene

Answer 2

Use the 'Open Work Item in Microsoft Excel' or 'Open Query in Microsoft Excel'.

There it will let you change the Assigned To. Then press publish.

Bartizan