Azure DevOps Boards

Boards is the joining force of the Azure DevOps work items. It contains four different views for work items (well five if you count queries) and they are all suitable for different purposes. In this post I’m going to show you the main differences between work items, boards, backlogs and sprint views.

Work Items

On top of the menu is Work Items. Work items view is good for finding work items from multiple backlogs and iterations. It has filter and pivot functions to streamline listing of the work items. You can use this page to quickly find work items within project. For example I use it to view tickets, that are resolved and waiting for verification (testing).

Boards

Boards view is intended for Kanban like work handling, if you use sprints, then you can basically ignore this view. Every team defined in Azure DevOps has their own board and the currently visible team can be changed from left drop down.

Boards view can show mainly features or user stories. The view level affects how the child items are shown. For features the child item is user story and for user story it is task. It is good to remeber that tasks in boards page don’t have own lanes and their state is hidden. Tasks in Boards have two states: Todo and done. I recommend not to split user stories for multiple developers, when Board view is used. Try to assign each story to one developer, this way you don’t get mess on who is doing what.

Backlogs

With Backlogs page, you can plan your project by adding user stories or requirements to your product backlog. Each team has their own backlog and like the boards view, the backlog view can show features or user stories. You can assign work items quickly into iterations by dragging them over right lane iterations (when planning side pane is enabled), or by right clicking work item and choosing move to iteration.

Sprints

Sprints is your main view if you use sprints in software development process. Sprint page is highly customizable. You can create new lanes, change fields that are visible for work items and change how bugs behaves. I think that sprints are the most powerful feature of Azure DevOps work items.

By default the tasks are used to monitor work progress. Developers splits the user stories into tasks and change their states as the work progresses. When all tasks are closed the developer should move the user story into resolved or closed state (note that this doesn’t happen automatically).

Unlike in Boards view, it is quite common that multiple developers work with one user story with the help of tasks.

Summary

Boards is the backbone of work item handling in Azure DevOps. You don’t have to use all the views to run a successful development process, but you should still know what are the views that you should look after. For iterative development that is Work Items, Backlogs and Sprints and for Kanban like development: Work Items, Backlogs and Boards.

If you want to read more about Boards features, I recommend reading the Microsoft’s excellent documentation from here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/