Managing Work items with Azure Boards

For agile planning and portfolio management, Azure Boards is an effective tool to manage work items.

What are work items in Software development project? They are used to track the features and requirements of your project, code bugs and risks that may be associated with the project. As demonstrated in my article on Agile Planning and Portfolio management, while creating the project, EShopOnWeb, Scrum was selected as the Work item process. This will determine the work item types available on which each work item will be based. In this blog, I will demonstrate how to manage work item available for tracking information under the Scrum process. However, there are other options of work item process that you can select from. These are Agile process, Basic process and CMMI process. Work items plays an essential role in accomplishing the overall project because work items are individual tasks that made up the entire project. They can be used to describe work to be done, impediments to be released, test definitions or other key items.

Let's get to work now! There is a pre-requisite for this Lab on managing work items, that we will do first. That is, a preconfigured Parts Unlimited team project. (NB: It is a requirement for some Azure DevOps Lab).

Configuring Parts Unlimited Teams Project

Step 1
We will use Azure DevOps Demo Generator to automate the
creation of a new Azure DevOps project within my account that
is prepopulated with content like work items, repos etc. To do
this, I will open this link on my browser
https://azuredevopsdemogenerator.azurewebsites.net/ and sign in
using the Microsoft account associated with my Azure DevOps
subscription

Step 2
I will accept the permission request for accessing my subscription.

Step 3
Click on the dropdown on the right side of Select organisation to select on your Azure DevOps organisation and type Parts Unlimited as the name of the project.

Step 4
Click on Choose Template as shown in the image above. Select Parts Unlimited. Next, click on Select Template

Step 5
Click on Create Project

Yeah! We are ready to move on to the main Lab to demonstrate how to manage work items with Azure Boards

Managing Work items
To demonstrate this, we will use work items to set up the plan to extend the Parts Unlimited site, project created above, with a product training section.

Step 1
Log in to your Azure DevOps portal and on the vertical navigational pane, click on Boards and select Work items.
Next, click on + New Work Item and select Epic

Step 2
In the Title box, type Product Training and click on Unassigned entry and from the dropdown menu select your user account to assign the new work item to yourself.

Step 3
By the side of Area entry, Click on EShopOnWeb entry as shown in the image below

From the dropdown menu, select EShop-Web. The Area will be set to EShopOnWeb\EShop-Web.

Step 4

By the side of Iteration entry, Click on EShopOnWeb entry

From the dropdown menu, select Sprint 2. The Iteration will be set to EShopOnWeb\Sprint 2. Then click on Save but do not close the page

Step 5
In the Related work section, click on + Add link. Then select New item from the dropdown menu.

Now, click on the Link type and from the dropdown list, select Child; next on the dropdown list of Work item type select Feature; in the Title textbox, type Training Dashboard and click OK

Step 6
On the New Feature Training Dashboard, click on Save and Close

Step 7
On the Azure DevOps navigation pane in the Boards menu, click on Boards, then EShop-Web boards as shown below

In the upper right corner of the page, click on Backlog items and from the dropdown menu select Features

Step 8
Hover the cursor on the rectangle representing the Training Dashboard feature. This will reveal the ellipsis symbol (...) in its upper right corner, click on it and from the dropdown menu, select Add Product Backlog item

Step 9
In the textbox of the new product backlog item, type As a customer, I want to view tutorials and press the Enter key to save the entry. This will create a new product backlog item (PBI) Work item that is a child of the feature and shares its area and iteration

Repeat the same step to add these two product backlog items:
As a customer, I want to see tutorials I recently viewed
As a customer, I want to request new tutorials

Step 10
In the upper right corner of the Boards panel, select the Features entry and from the dropdown menu, select Backlog items

Step 11
On the Board tab of the EShop-WEB panel, I will drag the first work item: As a customer, I want to view new tutorials from the New stage and drop it under the Approved stage

Step 12
On the rectangle representing the first work item that I moved to the Approved stage, I will hover the cursor to reveal a down facing caret symbol and click on it to expand the work item card. Then click on Unassigned and assign the PBI to myself.

Step 13
I will drag the second work item, As a customer, I want to see tutorials I recently viewed from the New stage and drop it on the Committed stage.
I will drag the third work item, As a customer, I want to request new tutorials from the New stage and drop it on the Done stage.

Step 14
On the Board tab of the EShop-WEB pane, at the top of the pane, click on Backlog to display the tabular form.

Step 15
Still on the Backlog tab of the EShop-WEB pane, in the upper left corner of the pane, click the second plus sign from the top, the one next to the first work item. This will display the NEW TASK panel.
In the Enter title textbox, type Add page for most recent tutorials.
In the Remaining Work textbox, type 5
In the Activity dropdown menu, select Development
Then click on Save & Close

Step 16
We will repeat Step 15 above to add another task.
Click on the plus sign from the top
On the NEW TASK panel, in the Enter Title textbox type Optimize data query for most recent tutorials
In the Remaining Work textbox, type 3
In the Activity dropdown menu, select Design
Then click on Save & Close

Waoh! In this task we have been able to have a walkthrough on how to manage work items with a popular agile tool, Azure Boards. Simple, not so?

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