I spent practically the entire last week lying on the couch, feverish. The second round of COVID felt a bit more brutal in my aging body, forcing me to take a slightly longer break than I initially thought. However, the illness has now been overcome, and I am slowly trying to return to life, work and blogging.
Azure DevOps has introduced a bunch of interesting features that I plan to explore more closely in the coming weeks. One of the biggest and long-awaited improvements is called Team Automation Rules, which practically allows rules to be created based on the states of subtasks. By default, the rule set provides two very important rules:
- When a single child item is activated, then activate the parent.
- When all child items are closed, then close the parent (or resolve it).
With this feature, for example, the state of a user story can now be based on the state of the tasks beneath it, and the user story does not need to be manually switched to the activated/closed state separately. It may seem like a small thing, but automation significantly impacts statistics, among other things. Feature is still in private preview, but I think it will be rolled out in near future.
A separate blog post about this and other new features is coming later, where the matter will be explored in a bit more detail. Until then, good health and a joyful winter to you, dear reader.