Manage your team workflow with Azure Boards - Azure Tutorial

- [Instructor] Azure Boards is the place in Azure DevOps for managing software projects. It has tools for planning, work assignments, and reports. Azure Boards offers essential tasks such as tracking work items, this allows teams to monitor and manage tasks, bugs, and user stories throughout the project lifecycle. You can visualize work in Azure Boards using Kanban boards and dashboards to track the status and progress of work items. Plan and organize work by structuring and prioritizing tasks such as backlogs and dashboards for efficient project management. Azure boards streamline scrum with timeboxed sprints, allowing teams to manage and commit to work efficiently. Teams can plan sprints by dragging and dropping work items while interactive task boards help track progress and support effective scrum practices. There is a powerful query feature that creates custom work item lists, use queries for bulk updates, creating detailed reports and status or trend charts. These charts can be added to dashboards to monitor project health and progress. Delivery plans in Azure Boards offers a calendar view that helps teams visualize deliverables and track dependencies across different teams and projects. This feature is useful for coordinating complex projects with multiple interdependent components, ensuring that all teams are aligned and aware of the timelines for delivery. All work in Azure Boards is tracked through an artifact called a work item. Work items are used by you and your team to describe the details of the tasks and activities that need to be completed in a software project. A work item is a unit of work, which we use to represent any type of task or activity or piece of work. They are used to record, describe, and manage the details of all the work being done. When you create a work item, you specify details about that work to create a flexible system that accommodates diverse software teams. Azure Boards must understand the specific tracking needs of your team. What is tracked depends on what process methodology is used. For example, an Agile team will use different terminology and workflows from other types of process systems. To address this, Azure Board supports four process templates, Basic, Agile, Scrum, and CMMI. Each one caters to a specific target audience and provides a variety of predefined work item types and workflows. Each DevOps team can pick the process that fits their style. The process is different mainly in the work item types they provide for planning and tracking work. When you create a new Azure DevOps project, you select a work item process, which becomes the default for all people working on that project. Templates are per project, so your team will pick the template that matches your desired workflow. This flexibility means that within the same organization, different teams can use different templates. For example, one team might adopt the Scrum template while another utilizes the Agile template. The basic template is the simplest model, designed for teams that prefer a minimalistic approach. This is essentially a DevOps version of a to-do list. The focus is on work items and version control. Work items can include a variety of things like tasks, bugs, and issues that need to be tracked and managed. Version control is about maintaining the code base and managing changes to it. The Agile process template is a popular one. Agile teams approach software development by emphasizing incremental delivery, team collaboration, continual planning, and continual learning. The Agile process template embodies the principles of the Agile manifesto, focusing on customer collaboration, adaptive planning, and early delivery. It's equipped with features like user stories and backlogs that facilitate iterative development and encourage continuous feedback. Scrum is a framework used by teams to manage their work. Scrum implements the principles of Agile as a concrete set of artifacts, practices, and roles. In essence, Agile is the mindset or philosophy with a focus on flexibility, continuous improvement, and customer satisfaction, while Scrum is one of the most popular ways to put that philosophy into practice through a set of rules, roles, and rituals designed to create a regular rhythm of work and feedback. It includes defined roles like scrum master and product owner artifacts like product backlog and sprint backlog, and events like sprints and daily stand ups that guide the development process. CMMI is a model created in the 1990s and is a collection of engineering, management, service, and improvement practices. It is commonly used in government contracts and still has a following. This template is best suited for organizations that prioritize process maturity and have stringent quality requirements. Work items, as mentioned earlier, are the basic components of Azure Boards and are categorized into buckets. There are two main buckets, issues and backlogs. These categories are named differently depending on the process template you choose. For example, in the issues category, scrum uses impediment. Agile has issue and bug tracking, and CMMI uses issue, change requests, and risks. The basic template simply calls them issues. The key concept is that issues are work items impeding the project's progress, and the team must address them to move forward. Backlogs by contrast are where you keep work items that haven't entered active development, they are essentially prioritized lists of work that provide visibility into the work items that a team plans to work on. The names and types of work items in the backlog can vary between the different process templates. In the Scrum process, they are called product backlog items. In the Agile process, they are typically referred to as user stories. The Basic process uses the term issues for its backlog items And for the CMMI process, the backlog items are known as requirements. There are differences in the work items too. You can see that in this example. This is the bug work item, which is in the issues category. The screenshots are Agile on the top and Scrum on the bottom. As you look over the screenshots, you can see the differences. In Agile, there's a section for planning and discussion. In Scrum, it has sections for details and acceptance criteria. Now, let's talk about another key aspect of Azure Boards, the Kanban board. Kanban originally developed by Toyota as a scheduling system for lean and just-in-time manufacturing, helps a team focus on quality by ensuring that work meets an agreed upon level of quality before it can be considered done. In software development, Kanban consists of stakeholders adding requests to a backlog, and the team then pulling work into their workflow as capacity allows. The Kanban board is used to visualize this process. By placing all the work items on cards on the board, the team can quickly see the overall status of the project and identify potential bottlenecks. For instance, a team manager might notice that there are 20 hours of work on the Kanban board, but the team only has 14 hours of capacity available. The board helps highlight this conflict, enabling better resource allocation and planning. Here is a sample of a Kanban board. In this view, we can see the work progressing from new, to develop, to build, and test. Azure Board's delivery plans provide a highly interactive calendar view of multiple teams backlogs, allowing teams to visualize and track the progress of work items, milestones, and dependencies across different projects. This feature helps in aligning team efforts, ensuring timely delivery of project goals, and improving overall project transparency. Here's an example from the Microsoft's doc site. This image shows the delivery plan interface focusing on the feature timeline and story section. The first column lists the teams involved in the planning, such as the Microsoft Azure DevOps team and the Azure Pipelines team. Other columns represent each month from October to February. Each cell contains progress details marked by colored bars or tags, like feature and user story, along with a bug count for each month. Here are the key features of delivery plans. There's a unified view. It provides a calendar view of multiple backlogs and teams allowing large teams to visualize their work schedules and dependencies in one place. This helps in aligning efforts across different teams and projects. Dependency tracking enables tracking of the dependencies between work items, which is crucial for large teams working on interconnected task. This ensures that all dependencies are managed effectively, reducing the risk of delay. Progress monitoring, this is where delivery plans offers roll-up views of progress showing the percentage completion of child and linked work items. This helps in monitoring the overall progress of large projects and identifying any bottlenecks. And then finally, we have cross-project coordination. It supports viewing and managing work items across multiple projects, making it easier for large teams to coordinate efforts and ensure that all projects are on track. Azure Board Queries are a powerful feature used to create custom lists of work items based on specific criteria. This screenshot shows the Azure Board's interface for managing queries. We are looking at a custom query called Tadd's Items. At the top, there are filter options for fields like work item type, state, and assigned to. There's operators available such as equals, not equals, and contains. This is a simple query that looks for all the items assigned to Tadd, but it can do so much more. For example, Tadd's manager can use it for bulk updates. If Tadd goes on vacation, the manager can reassign his items to another team member. In summary, Azure Boards is a visual and interactive issue tracking system, which can be used for your complete software development lifecycle. It is highly customizable to suit your project needs and has built in tools for communication and collaboration. It offers querying dashboards, Kanban boards, it has reports for real time project insights and it integrates well with other Azure DevOps services.