A Closer Look at the Azure Cloud Portfolio – 3. Azure DevOps Boards

• Azure Boards (AB) is a standalone service within the Azure DevOps suite that helps teams plan, track, and discuss work across the entire software development process.
• AB is a tool for managing software development work. It is primarily used in Azure DevOps to help organize work and daily activities for the team.
• Reasons to Use AB: Simple to Start, Easy to Grow; Easily Customizable; Easy Tracking of all the Information; Built-in Dashboards & Analytics.
• In this post, we will setup a simple Azure DevOps project; add teams to your project; create and manage work items; customize the project’s boards; explore different views of your work items, and organize them into sprints.
• Read more BBC News.

1. Getting Started with AB

You need the MS account to start AB.

Choose Start free option.

Choose Public option

Click Advanced: Git version control (there could be code versions or file management) and Basic work item process

The first/second one is the distributed/centralized version control

Project management process:

Agile, Basic, CMMI, Scrum

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process level improvement training and appraisal program. 

Click Create

2. Setting Up the AB Project

You can choose the project profile image and change process and visibility.

We need all available AB services

Add another administrator who has the MS account and access to Azure DevOps

Let’s manage teams.

We can see available teams for this project

Create a new team

3. Creating Work Items

Let’s create and import work items.

New work item: Epic, Issue, Task.

Epic – High-level project tasks

Set priority level 1-4 and related existing work item.

Planning: priority, start and target dates.

Add Description and Discussion.

View the history of changes made to this item and attachments.

Press Refresh button or revert changes.

Link an issue to my task.

Let’s save and go back to work items.

Let’s import items instead of adding them manually using csv files.

Save items to complete

4. Customizing AB

Scroll the page horizontally

Let’s add and choose the priority column

Reorder the columns by moving Priority column up

Let’s sort columns

Save changes

Filter by type

States is for filtering by their status Doing or To Do.

You can have multiple filtering criteria

Click clear to remove it

Or uncheck its boxes

The items context menu

Deleted items are not permanently removed from Azure boards

They are moved to the recycling bin

You can restore work items using Restore.

5. Creating Sprints

Boards – continue where you left off

You can drag items between the columns

Can move issues around with automated updates of the status

Add a new issue

Move to doing state

Assign it to a team member and move it to Done

You can still use the filtering bar

And switch to full screen mode

Switch to Backlog View

The backlog is optimized for the planning

Add new items and divide work into time slots called sprints

Start organizing issues

Switch to Epics view

And drag my task to sprint 1

Switch to sprints view once done with backlogs

Use the same filter to control the view

Summary

• Microsoft’s Azure is a Software as a service (SaaS) platform that offers complete DevOps tools
• It is an excellent choice for coordinating DevOps services and integrates with the majority of top tools on the market.
• No matter the language, platform, or cloud we use, we have found that Azure DevOps fits our requirements.
• Key advantages: The flexibility of Azure DevOps allows for the independent use of each of its services. Platform Independent: Despite being a Microsoft product, Azure DevOps does not simply focus on platforms and languages created by Microsoft.  Instead, it has been created to run on any operating system, including Linux, Windows, and macOS, as well as any language, including .Net, Java, PHP, Python, C, C++, iOS, and NodeJS.
• Cloud Independent
• In addition to Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are also supported by the Continuous Integration and Delivery model of Azure DevOps.
• Azure DevOps api comprises several services spanning the entire software development life cycle (SDLC). The following services make up Azure DevOps api, which is not a single program.
• Azure Boards, Pipeline, Repos, Artifacts, Test Plans

• What About the CI/CD Tooling I Already Have? Azure DevOps’ flexibility is one of the features we value the most. It is versatile enough to use your existing tools and expandable (through a marketplace).
• Azure DevOps Services vs Azure DevOps Server: The server and the services were referred to as Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), respectively. They offer environments compatible with Agile tools, continuous integration, and Git. 
• Read more here.

E-Training

• Getting Started with Azure DevOps Boards

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