Azure Devops Project Configuration - Overview and Boards

Azure Dashboards

Azure Dashboards are used to add widgets for graphical representations to your project. We have Azure DevOps marketplace to add widgets as per our requirement by clicking on the "Add a widget" button. We can customize and configure dashboards to your teams. It will help to monitor progress, and improve your workflow processes and information about the project.

Features

Dashboards, Charts, Widgets, Power BI reports, system-generated reports, and Quick Links by using charts.

Dashboards

You'll get an option to select widgets to visualize the items as shown in the below screen. If you want more widget items click on this URL:https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/ to configure.

Visualize

Azure Boards

Azure boards are used to create story points, features, and epics for planned sprint releases in our organization and track work items with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting. You can quickly and easily start tracking user stories, backlog items, tasks, features, and bugs associated with your project.

Below are the components available in Azure boards.

Work Items
Boards
BackLogs
Sprints
Queries

Work Items

Work items are a collection of epics, features, issues, bugs, test cases, user stories, etc. to track the features and requirements for developing code in the project.

Work Items

Features for Work Items

We can upload work items manually from the application or else we can connect DevOps projects by using team extensions in Excel.

Follow the below link for Working with Excel.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/backlogs/office/track-work?view=azure-devops

Now create one Excel workbook for managing all work items.

You need to add a team plugin
Select New List
Connect your TFS server (Azure DevOps Server) by clicking on the servers button.
In Server windows, add your project URL as shown in the below screenshot.

After clicking on OK, It will be redirected to login and authenticate with your username and password. Once you're done with your login, add your project and select the input list for the default template. Fill your story points for sprint releases by selecting dropdown options in WorkItem type, State, Reason, and Assigned To.

Server

Here we will check how Azure Boards will help to execute.

Scrum Master/Project Manager knows the features, epics, tasks, stories, allocation resources for sprints, task cards, etc. All this type of management activity will happen in this Azure Boards.

We will discuss more about Azure boards and basic use cases step by step.

Now our PM has planned an activity to release one registration page and login page for the first sprint.

Now the organization's HR has allocated resources for a brand new project, and below is the initial resources list.

Name	Mail ID	Expertise
Naveen Kumar	[email protected]	Technical Architect
Maniteja Vegi	[email protected]	Full Stack Developer
Avinash Reddy	[email protected]	Full Stack Developer
Ravi Kumar	[email protected]	Tester

Azure DevOps engineer will create some Azure resources like DevOps Azure projects for building, testing, and releasing applications, Azure App Services, Azure Database, etc.

Sprint 1 Requirements (For Example)

Epics	Features	Stories	Tasks
User Information	User Information Storage	Create a registration page.	Create a table for maintaining user information, Create a page for UI, Create a method to handle Create operation
		Create a login page	Create a page for UI for the login page, Create a method to handle login operations, and Maintain validations as per initial test cases.

We're uploading the above requirements WBS (Work Breakdown Stories) to Azure work items by using an Excel sheet as shown in the below screenshot.

Prepare your work items as shown in the below figure and publish work items to Azure work items.

Azure work

Once your work items are published, they will be available in Work Items under Azure Boards.

Azure Boards

More about work item features will be explained in upcoming articles.

Boards

Features

You can configure multiple Kanban Boards for your project requirements.
You can Filter Work Item Types by selecting the dropdown shown in the above screenshot.
You can filter your work items.
You can customize your Kanban boards with ‘n’ no. of States, Colours for cards, etc.
Monitoring work items are available in the present Kanban board.
In the middle of the sprint, you can manage your team by adding or removing team members to work in Iterations (Sprints).
You can prioritize your work items by giving tag information and color codings.
You can block your final states by product owners by restricting access to other team members.

Backlogs in Azure Boards

In backlogs, complete work items will be available to distribute each iteration (sprint) to the sprint delivery. You can drag and drop work items to include them in an iteration (sprint). Backlogs display work items as a list and boards display them as cards. You can quickly plan your project by adding user stories or requirements to your product backlog. Once you have your plan in place, you can start driving code development efforts by assigning cards to your employees (Developers, Testers, etc).

Developers

Sprints in Azure Boards

Iteration information available in this section is to track sprint delivery dates, work items, sprint history, capacities of resources assigned to sprints, analytics (Burndown Trend), task board for current and previous sprints, work items tracking, etc. You can easily search, drag, and drop work items (backlog items) to planned sprints. You can set sprint capacity by adjusting your work to fit in the sprint capacity plan.

Sprints in Azure

Queries in Azure Boards

You can create public and private queries as per project requirements, Eg: I need to know all work items available in this sprint using queries and I’ll generate charts by using those queries and binding them in Dashboards. Also, bulk add or remove work items, tags, etc.

Queries in Azure

Now I'm creating a query to get closed items in representational charts, below is the logic shown in the screenshot.

Representational charts

Now we can get closed work items in charts by configuring shared queries.

Shared queries

Happy Coding.