Do you need a tool to help you organize your work and don’t know which one to use? Or are you thinking of using Azure Boards but you’re not quite convinced yet? Let me tell you why you should start using Azure Boards right now. Even if you are not hosting your code in Azure DevOps!
Video
As usual, if you are a visual learner, or simply prefer to watch and listen instead of reading, here you have the video with the whole explanation and demo.
Link to the video: https://youtu.be/T3_UNAA8onw
If you rather prefer reading, well... let's just continue :)
Intro to Azure Boards
Azure Boards is a standalone service within the Azure DevOps suite that helps teams plan, track, and discuss work across the entire software development process. It provides a flexible, customizable platform for managing work items, such as user stories, bugs, tasks, and issues, so you can track your work item's progress throughout the development lifecycle.
Azure Boards supports agile methodologies, including Scrum and Kanban, and provides a range of features and integrations to help teams collaborate and stay organized with dashboards, reports, and notifications.
Last but not least, Azure Boards doesn’t require you to have your code in Azure Repos or use Azure Pipelines for CI/CD… even tho of course it works even better if you do :)
11 Reasons to Start Using Azure Boards
Now that we have a basic understanding of what Azure Boards is and does, why should you use it?
Reason 1: Start Simply, Scale as you grow
First of all, it is very easy to start with it and allows you to scale as you grow.
Azure Boards offers predefined work item types for tracking features, user stories, bugs, and tasks, making it easy to start using your product backlog or Kanban board.
As mentioned before, it supports different Agile methods, so you can implement the one which suits you best.
Additionally, you can add teams as your organization grows to give them the autonomy to track their work as they see fit.
Reason 2: Use visual, interactive tools
Next reason is that Azure Boards has plenty of visual tools to help teams quickly see and share progress. As we have seen, you can use Kanban boards, which provide an intuitive and visual way to manage your projects, track work items, and collaborate with your team effectively, and product backlogs, which correspond to your project plan, the roadmap for what your team plans to deliver and include users stories, requirements and backlog items.
You can also use the built-in scrum boards and planning tools, and finally delivery plans, which allow to review the schedule of stories or features that your teams plan to deliver by showing the scheduled work items by sprint (iteration path) of selected teams against a calendar view.
Reason 3: Customize easily
Third reason to start using Azure Boards is that it is very easily to configure and customize all its parts through the user interface.
You can make your own versions of Kanban boards, taskboards, and delivery plans , as well as add custom fields, work item types, and portfolio backlogs.
This will make sure the tool adapts to your needs and processes, and won’t instead require you to adapt to the tool.
Reason 4: Use built-in social tools and communication
Another reason, the fourth, is the ease of communication.
Work item forms provide built-in discussions that you can use to capture questions, notes, and communication as they occur.
With this feature, you can maintain a history of what a team decides on any particular work item. An dyou can quickly bring a team member or an entire team into the conversation by using @name mentions.
Reason 5: Capture information, generous cloud storage
Fifth reason on my list to use Azure Boards is something we take for granted but in fact it’s not always the case: information and storage.
As I’ve mentioned before, work items are designed to track all the information you need to track. And this doesn’t stop to text. You can in fact edit in rich text, drag and drop inline images, and add larger attachments. You can add attachments up to 60 MB and as many as 100 attachments.
Also, you can link work items within a hierarchy or by simple related links. Each work item maintains a history of changes, so you can review what changed, who made the change, and when.
Reason 6: Find what you need quickly and get notified of changes
Sixth reason to start using the service is that Azure Boards provides easy-to-use tools to help you quickly find specific work items as your project grows.
You can follow work items to monitor updates and changes, use pivot views to show work items assigned to you, use the query engine to filter work items based on any field, and use ad-hoc search with quick inline filters.
You can also personalize your alerts for work items that are assigned to you or have been changed.
Reason 7: Monitor status and progress with built-in dashboards and analytics
Seventh, with Azure Boards you gain access to many tools to generate reports and to support tracking status and trends.
By using configurable dashboards, you can add one or more widgets to display the information and data you want, such as the bug burndown widget. Along with dashboards, you have access to the Analytics service. This service is optimized for fast read-access and server-based aggregations.
By using Analytics views and Power BI, you can create highly sophisticated reports on the project data of interest.
Reason 8: Integrate with Office
And if that wasn’t enough, eighth reason, Project managers who want to use familiar tools can import and export work item queries to and from Microsoft Office Excel or import and export work items using .csv files.
Excel supports adding work items, updating existing work items, adding links and attachments to multiple work items, and more. You can also use native Excel features to support other actions, such as summing a column, copy-and-paste rows, fill down data into cells, and more.
Reason 9: Extend functionality
You can gain even greater functionality by adding Marketplace extensions, many of which are free, and this is my reason number 9.
An extension is an installable plugin that adds capabilities to Azure DevOps and of course Azure Boards. You can find extensions within these products or in the Visual Studio Marketplace, under the Azure DevOps tab.
Also, by using the REST API, you can create your own extensions or tools to integrate with Azure DevOps Services.
Reason 10: Get updates via a mobile browser
Ok all good… but “Dave”, I hear you say, “I_’m often working in mobility…. I need something I can use everywhere, perhaps even on my phone_”! Well, it’s your lucky day 😄 Tenth on my list is the mobile support.
With Azure Boards, it's easy to stay on top of changes as they occur!
With the mobile browser and work item form, you gain on-the-go features to stay on top of the latest updates made to work tracking. When you click any work item link on your mobile device, it will open a mobile-friendly version of the work item. From there, you can update the work item or access all work items assigned to you or that you're following.
Reason 11: Start for free
Ok, what more after all we have seen? Well, last (but definitely not for importance) reason for me to use Azure Boards is that… well… you can start absolutely for free! And if your team is up to 5 users.. well, you can keep it for free forever.
Also, anybody in your team with a Visual Studio subscription gains free access to Azure Boards as well. And finally, you can add unlimited stakeholder users to it.
If you want to know more about the stakeholder users in Azure DevOps check out the video I made about this subject.
Conclusions
Alright, those were my 11 reasons to start using Azure Boards. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below if you going to use Azure Boards, or at least you want to give it a try. Also, in case you won’t, let me know why and if there is any feature you think it’s missing from my list.
Also, check out this video, in which I show some of the features of Azure Boards in action
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