Olalekan Oladiran

Posted on Jan 27

Basics of Azure Boards

#webdev #devops #career #cloud

Working with teams, areas, and iterations

Click on your project to open the project
Click project settings to open settings page
Click Teams
Click New Team to create Team
Provide a name for the Team and select create
After finish saving, a notification showing that the team has been created and one member added to it will pop up. Click on the newly created Team.
We need to define the schedule and scope of the team by clicking Iterations and Area Paths
This will open a new tab showing the team configuration settings. click iteration and click select iteration
Choose an iteration ( sprint 1, sprint 2, sprint 3)
Make sure to repeat choosing an iteration to select three sprints.
Note that from the assigned date, sprint 1 is past iteration, sprint 2 is present iteration and sprint 3 is the near future iteration.
Next is to select Area tab
Click on the ellipsis beside default area and select Include sub areas from the dropdown
Note that this will give the team access to all of the work items from all teams.

How to use various work items

Go to main overview page of the project and select dashboard
Select the overview dashboard for your project.
Under New work item section, type product training in the enter title section, select Epic and create
Assigned the new work item to yourself, choose your project in the area section and choose sprint 2 for iteration
Go to boards and click work items
Locate the newly created work item and open it.
After opening the work item, in the related work section, click Add link and select New item
Set the Link Type to Child, Work item type to Feature and set the Title to “Training dashboard”. Click OK after.
Select save and close
Go to Boards under Boards tab and select the board associated with your Team name under My team boards
Change the items the board is showing from Backlogs items to Features
After changing to Features, You will see the title of the link added and click on the ellipsis in front of it and select Add Product Backlog Item
Give name to the first Backlogs item and press enter and create two more Product Backlog Items.
Change the view back from Features to Backlog Items and it will display the newly created product backlog items
Every item in the backlog has a state that indicates its current status in relation to completion. It's simpler to just drag them onto the board, even though you could open and change the work item using the form. So I will drag the first work item to Approved, the second work item to Committed and the third work to done.
To view the work items in tabular form, click View as Backlog.
Work item can also be created using the + sign on the backlog. Click on it to add new task
Fill the necessary and click save and close

Working with filters in backlogs and boards

Go to Backlog items view and choose the filter sign; a funnel or pressing Ctrl+Shift+f.
Choose Clear and dismiss filters to clear filtering.
Note that you can filter the work items in boards or backlog view using a key word or Assigned To, Work Item Type, States, Area Path and Iteration Path fields.

How to manage sprints and capacity

During the sprint planning meeting, which usually takes place on the first day of the sprint, your team develops the sprint backlog. Every sprint aligns with a time-boxed period that facilitates the application of Agile techniques and technologies by your team. Your product owner collaborates with your team to determine which stories or backlog items need to be finished in the sprint during the planning meeting.

Go to sprints
Click view option and select work details.
Under To do, there are two tasks with the allocated hours and both tasks tasks has not been assigned.
Assign to yourself the first task
Select capacity to determine what activities a user can take on and the level of capacity. Choose development under activity and set capacity per day to 1.
We can pretend you want to take some vacation for 5 working days. Do that by clicking 0 days under Days off
Set the start and End date and click Ok
Click save
Go back to the Taskboard
The boards have the useful characteristic of allowing easy in-line updates to essential data. Updating the Remaining Work estimate on a regular basis to account for the time allotted for each activity is a smart idea. Let's imagine you've examined the Add page task and discovered that it will require more time than you had anticipated. For this sprint, set it to whatever your maximum capacity is.
In case there is capacity issue, the best way to resolve this is to move the task to future iteration. Click Backlog, select the ellipsis beside the task and click move to iteration.
Go back to Taskboard, click view options and select People under Group by.
This modifies your view so that you can examine task progress by individual rather than by backlog item.
You can customize the taskboard by clicking on configure team settings.
Select styles, click +styling rule, give a name, scroll down to choose card color.
Click Add new clause, choose Activity under Field and Development under value.
You can configure the levels that are available for navigation on the Backlogs tab.
The team's working days can also be specified. This is true for computations of capacity and burndown.
You may customize how bugs are shown on the board by going to the Working with bugs page. Click save and close after.

How to customize Kanban boards

Kanban emphasizes two key principles to maximize a team's capacity to continuously produce high-quality software. To begin with, you must map out the stages of your team's workflow and set up your Kanban board accordingly in order to visualize the flow of work. In order to limit the quantity of work in progress, you must establish work-in-progress (WIP) limitations. After that, you may use your Kanban board to monitor progress and important key performance indicators in order to cut down on lead or cycle time. Your Kanban board creates a visual flow of work by transforming your backlog into an interactive signboard. You change the elements on the board as work moves from concept to completion.

Go back to board and click configuration settings. We are going to apply rules to the cards color of the kanban board and taskboard. Click the styles tab and select + Add styling rule
Give a name to the rule, add the desired color
Click Add new clause, choose a field from the dropdown under field and select a value. Click save and close once done.
The backlogs with priority 1 will be in the chosen color.
Since the team is focusing on work done with data, any task related to retrieving or storing data receives extra attention. We need to Add Tag color. click configuration team settings, select Tag color tab, Click Add Tag, give a name for the tag and choose desired color.
To make the cards simpler to read and navigate, you may also indicate the annotations you want to have included on them. When an annotation is enabled, clicking the visualization on each card will provide easy access to the child work items of that type.
You can set the appearance and behavior of tests on the cards using the Tests tab.
Click save and close
To check if the Tag color has been assigned, open any work item and click + to add tag
You can add new stages to workflow, click configure team settings, select column tab, give it a name, set the Work In Progress(WIP) and click save and close.
You will see the new column in the workflow stages.
There is frequently a delay between the start of work and the movement of the work into a column. You can enable split columns to overcome that lag and show the true status of work in progress. Your team can use split columns to construct a pull model. Teams advance their work when there are no split columns, indicating that they have finished a particular task. Go to configuration team settings and select column tab, tick Split column into doing and done.
It is beneficial if your team members can agree on what constitutes "done" as they update the status of the job as it moves from one stage to the next. One way to facilitate the sharing of necessary activities prior to an item being moved into a downstream stage is by clearly defining the Definition of done criterion for each Kanban column. Add definition of done and click save and close.
You can also see the current state of work supporting various service-level classes when you add swimlanes. To meet your tracking needs, you can design a swimlane to represent any other dimension. Go to configuration team settings and click swimlanes tab, Click + swimlanes and provide a name for it. Click save and after.

Defining Dashboard

Click overview and select dashboard
Click Parts Unlimited Team Overview and select New dashboard
Provide a name for the new dashboard, select a team and click create Click Add a widget
In the Add widget pane, search for sprint to get existing widget and select sprint overview. Click Add after.
Click the settings button of the new widget
Each widget will have a different amount and level of settings.
Search for sprint and select sprint capacity
Click Done editing
The important aspect of the current sprint can now be reviewed from the custom dashboard.
Creating charts based on work item queries and sharing them to a dashboard is another method of personalizing dashboards. Go to Board and select queries.
Click New query
Set the Field and value of the query
Click save query Set a name and folder in the save query pane. Click save after.
Select charts tab and click new chart
Provide a name for the chart and select Assigned to in the dropdown under Group by
The chart can now be added to dashboard
Select a dashboard from the dropdown

How to Customize Team process

We are going to design a new method based on Scrum. The only thing we will alter is to include a backlog item field that will be linked to a unique ID.

Go to the account root by clicking on DevOps logo
Click organization settings
Click process under Board tab
Click ellipsis beside Scrum and select create inherited process
Provide a name for the Scrum process and click create process
Click on the newly created Scrum to open it
Click Product Backlog Item
Click New field
Provide a name for the field
Click the layout tab, fill the label, tick create new group, supply the group name and select Add field
The customized process has been configured, we need to switch our project in order to use it. Click All processes
Select scrum
Change the tab to project, click the ellipsis beside the project and select change process
Choose the Customized Scrum process and click Save.
Return to the root account by clicking Azure DevOps logo
Open the project
Click Boards and select work items Click on the first backlog item to open it
Ticket ID field will now be seen under the group created during customization