Reporting the number of times a user story's description has changed

[Eric Christ]

I've been asked to report on the number of times a user story's acceptance criteria has changed after it's been added to the board as part of a release. We use the Description field for this. I've had little success finding how to do this and the Lookback API does not include this field. Any suggestions?

[David LeDeaux]

Hi Eric,

There really isn't a great way to handle this.  As you are aware, LBAPI doesn't store data from full text fields like description and notes.

So that only leaves WSAPI, but the way that revisions are stored doesn't lend itself to querying in a gentle manner.  The structure is as follows:

• HierarchicalRequirement
  • RevisionHistory
    • Revisions

So you have to get the RevisionHistory object and then subsequently query its Revisions collection.  Since WSAPI isn't stateful, this can't be accomplished in a single query, so you really have to drop out to a language like Python or Java to accomplish this.

[Eric Christ]

Thanks for the info, David.