Introduction to Azure Boards
Azure Boards is a flexible and powerful tool for planning, tracking, and managing your team's work. It provides a variety of tools, including backlogs, Kanban boards, task boards, and dashboards, to help your team deliver value efficiently.
What is Azure Boards?
Azure Boards is part of the Azure DevOps Services suite. It's designed to support agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban, allowing teams to break down work into manageable pieces, track progress, and collaborate effectively. Whether you're managing a small project or a large enterprise-scale initiative, Azure Boards can be adapted to your team's needs.
Key Concepts
- Work Items: The fundamental building blocks of work in Azure Boards. These can represent features, user stories, bugs, tasks, epics, and more. Each work item has a unique ID and tracks specific details about the work.
- Backlogs: A prioritized list of all the work items needed to build your product. Product owners typically manage the product backlog, ensuring it's refined and ready for development.
- Boards: Visualizations of your work items, allowing teams to track progress. Common board types include:
- Kanban Boards: Visualize the flow of work, identify bottlenecks, and manage work in progress (WIP) limits.
- Task Boards: Used during sprints to visualize tasks and their status for the current iteration.
- Sprints: Time-boxed iterations (typically 1-4 weeks) during which a team works to complete a set of features or tasks.
- Queries: Powerful tools to search and filter work items based on various criteria. You can save and share queries to track specific aspects of your project.
Getting Started
To begin using Azure Boards, you'll need an Azure DevOps organization. If you don't have one, you can create one for free. Once you have an organization and a project, you can start adding work items to your backlog.
Creating Your First Work Item
Let's create a simple User Story. Navigate to your project's Boards section, then select Backlogs. Click the New Work Item button and choose User Story.
Fill in a title, for example: "As a user, I want to be able to log in to the system, so that I can access my personalized content."
1New Work Item: User Story
2Title: As a user, I want to be able to log in to the system, so that I can access my personalized content.
3Description: Users should be able to enter their credentials and submit them for authentication.
4Acceptance Criteria:
5- User can input username and password.
6- User can click a 'Login' button.
7- Upon successful login, user is redirected to the dashboard.
8- Upon failed login, an error message is displayed.
Next Steps
Now that you've got a basic understanding, you can explore the different board types, learn how to create sprints, and start building powerful queries to gain insights into your project's progress.
Continue to the next section to learn more about Kanban and Task Boards.
Explore Boards