TFS: Merge best practices

Question

We have a standard branch architecture where we have a development branch for each team, a common integration branch (from where all development branches are branched) and p

Answer 1

I've always only merged a range of commits into the integration branch, only specifying the range of the changesets that I've merged.

The work items related to individual work items at the development stage are development phase work items. I don't think there's any need to roll them on to integration or release.

You haven't specified where you're recording bugs / feature requests from customers. If you're assigning these to the release branch you're probably creating other, more detailed work items for the development branch and when merging you'll simply mark all the issues the bug fixes as resolved for the branch you're merging in.

So summing it up I see no reason why not to go with bulk merges.