Best Practices when customizing Work Items in Team Foundation Server (TFS)

So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to customize work items while still making sure the TFS instance is able to upgrade smoothly to future versions. In my Internet research, I actually came upon a good article on this from of all sources, Rational (Microsoft’s main competitor). This is due to the fact that they use almost the exact same data model for work items in their product (Rational Team Concert) as TFS does. They both even call them work items! Anyways, the article does a good job of dividing customization’s into “Safe”, “Cautious”,and “Harmful”. Based on my experience and expertise, these are some good principles to follow when customizing work items in a process template. You don’t want to over customize and be stuck on TFS 2005 for the next 10 years!
Enjoy!
https://jazz.net/library/article/1002