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Introduction to Azure Boards

Azure Boards provides a suite of agile tools to help your team plan, track, and discuss work across your projects. It offers customizable tools such as backlogs, Kanban boards, sprint taskboards, and query dashboards to support various agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, and CMMI.

Key Benefits:
  • Visualize Workflow: Understand your team's progress at a glance.
  • Track Progress: Monitor the status of individual work items and project milestones.
  • Facilitate Collaboration: Enhance communication and decision-making within your team.
  • Customizable: Adapt Boards to fit your team's unique processes.

Understanding Work Items

Work items are the fundamental building blocks for tracking any task, bug, user story, or feature in Azure Boards. Each work item has a unique ID and contains fields that capture details about the item.

Common Work Item Types:

  • Epic: A large body of work that can be broken down into smaller stories.
  • Feature: A service or capability provided by the system.
  • User Story: A requirement or feature described from the perspective of an end-user.
  • Bug: A defect or issue that needs to be resolved.
  • Task: A specific action to be performed to complete a user story or bug.

You can customize work item types to add or modify fields, states, and rules to match your team's workflow.

Kanban Boards

Kanban boards provide a visual representation of your team's workflow. You can use them to track the flow of work from 'To Do' to 'Done', identify bottlenecks, and manage work in progress (WIP).

A typical Kanban board column represents a stage in your workflow, and cards represent work items. You can drag and drop cards between columns to update their status.


<div class="kanban-board">
  <div class="column">
    <h3>To Do</h3>
    <div class="card">User Story 1</div>
    <div class="card">User Story 2</div>
  </div>
  <div class="column">
    <h3>In Progress</h3>
    <div class="card">User Story 3</div>
  </div>
  <div class="column">
    <h3>Done</h3>
    <div class="card">Bug 1</div>
  </div>
</div>

Backlogs

The backlog is your team's prioritized list of work items. It serves as a single source of truth for what needs to be done. You can prioritize items, estimate effort, and define acceptance criteria directly from the backlog view.

Sprints

For teams practicing Scrum, sprints are time-boxed iterations (usually 1-4 weeks) during which a set of work is completed and made ready for review. Azure Boards provides a sprint backlog view and a taskboard to manage sprint execution.

Queries

Queries allow you to search for specific work items based on various criteria. You can save and share queries, making it easy to find the information you need and build reports.

Example query criteria:

Dashboards

Dashboards provide a customizable view of your project's progress, team velocity, and other key metrics. You can add widgets to visualize data from work items, builds, test results, and more.

Integrations

Azure Boards integrates seamlessly with other Azure DevOps services like Azure Pipelines (for CI/CD) and Azure Repos (for source control). It also supports integrations with popular third-party tools.