What are Stakeholders in Azure DevOps and how you can gain all the benefits from this user type?
Stakeholders are special users in Azure DevOps. They are free tier user, who don’t have basic or any other Azure DevOps license assigned. However they have some restrictions and they cannot perform all the same things than users with basic or some any other license in Azure DevOps.
With Stakeholder user, you can add and edit work items, manage build and release pipelines + view dashboards. You can view the project status and provide feedback, feature ideas and communicate with the team. You cannot access repositories (view or edit code), edit all the project/organization settings and prioritize boards/sprints.
Basic Stakeholder features
This is the Stakeholder feature set addressed by learn.microsoft.com. Most of the Azure DevOps projects are private, so that is the column you most likely want to view for. I have highlighted the most important parts of permissions.
| Service, application, or setting | Private project | Public project |
|---|---|---|
| Azure Boards | Partial access | Full access |
| Azure Repos | No access | Full access |
| Azure Pipelines | Full access | Full access |
| Azure Test Plans | No access | No access |
| Azure Artifacts | Full access | Full access |
| Notifications | Full access | Full access |
| Semantic search | Full access | Full access |
| Project settings | Partial access | Partial access |
| Organization settings | Partial access | Partial access |
| Dashboards | Partial access | Full access |
| Wiki (Project wiki) | Partial access | Full access |
| Wiki (Code wiki) | No access | Full access |
If we go through this bit by bit. Azure Repos is logically ruled out here. Stakeholders cannot contribute on code level and they cannot view the source code. They also have no access for Test Plans, which requires own license (Test Plan) + Basic user license. Other than those Stakeholders have quite wide access set. Stakeholders have partial access on Azure Boards and let’s take a closer look what it means.
How to view what license you have
If you don’t know what license you currently have, you can navigate into organization settings > users page. The Access Level column shows your current license and if you have enough permissions, you can view all the other users licenses.
You can change the license by clicking … button at the end of the user row. Available license is based on your organization subscription (see billing page for more details). You can also set the default user license at Billing page. So if you want to add all the new users with basic license, you can do it from that page.
Azure Boards partial access
To give a short description about what Stakeholders can do for work items, I would say: “They can create, edit and view work items. Change and prioritize backlogs, but they cannot prioritize sprint boards. They also cannot create or edit queries, but they can run them.” The biggest drawbacks that causes pain with stakeholder license are the restriction to delete work items and change priority of item within Board/Sprint view. Other than that Stakeholder license can contribute well with the team as a non-coder role.
Dashboard partial access basically means that Stakeholders can view dashboards, but not edit or create them.
Enable full pipeline access for stakeholder
If you want to give full access to Azure Pipelines for Stakeholder users, you have to enable the preview feature from top right corner. Click User settings > Preview Features and select “For this organization” from top most dropdown menu. After that you can see “Full access to Azure Pipelines for Stakeholders” setting. By enabling this preview feature, Stakeholders can edit build and release pipelines like basic users. Stakeholders are still subject to permission set for their security group, so you can restrict them to read-only user group if you want to.
Summary
You can assign Stakeholder license to basically every member of the team, who don’t contribute on code level, or prioritize boards/sprints. We mainly use Stakeholder license for users who create new work items (bugs and users stories), but who aren’t part of daily job. For example beta testers and managers. Stakeholders can be easily upgraded into Basic license through Users page.