Introduction To Azure Boards

Azure Boards

• Native support for Scrum and Kanban
• Customized dashboards and integrated reporting
• Efficiently track user stories, backlog items, tasks, features, and bugs
• Track work using work items

Work Item Types

• Agile
• Basic
• Scrum
• CMMI

Features of Azure Boards

1. Interactive Tools
   Visual Tools helps the team to easily track and share progress
2. Ease of Customization
3. Built-in Tools for Collaboration
4. Monitor Status with built-in dashboards

Best Practices for Agile Project Management

Configure your teams

• Configure teams with the value streams of deliverables
• Configure teams to support rollup to project management feature teams

Configure your sprints

• Define sprint goals within the product group
• Define at least six or more iterations
• Determine how teams will manage backlog items
• Unassigned sprint work is assigned to the default or future backlog sprint

Choose the work item types to use

For Agile-based projects, It is recommended to use User Stories, Bugs, and Features.

• Quickly add features from the backlog
• Use Requirements — User Stories (Agile), Issues (Basic) Product Backlog Items (Scrum), or Requirements (CMMI)
• Use Bugs to capture code defects
• Map Requirements to Features to track progress at the project management level

How to work with Azure Boards using Azure CLI?

Create work item using Azure CLI,

az boards work-item create --title 'userstory' --type 'userstory' --area 'sprint 7'
[--assigned-to]
[--description]

Delete work item using Azure CLI,

az boards work-item delete --id {provideyourid}

Components of Azure Boards

Work Item

All the activity we do in Azure Boards is accessed using an artifact known as "Work Item". Work items are created by different team members to describe in detail the task to be performed.

Azure Boards

Azure Board is a pre-configured Kanban board for managing the track of work done by different team members during the sprint. It supports swim lines, custom filtering, and advanced configuration to create and track work items during the sprint.

Backlogs

Backlogs help to keep the work items ready which we are going to perform in upcoming sprints. We can already describe in detail the actual task to be performed, priority of the task. This backlog story can be discussed during the sprint refinement with the team to agree on the story points after that user story can be picked up in the sprint.

Sprints

Sprints allow the team to work on the delivery in an incremental way of working. Ideally, the duration of the sprint is 2 weeks.

Conclusion

Azure Boards can be used to create user stories, sprints, portfolios, and epic.