Cross team project with less admin - azure-devops

Hey any ADO experts here? I have a project which will be cross teams and I've been asked to set up a separate backlog for it but manage it independently across teams during their own stand ups with a Scrum of Scrums between POs. Is there an ADO hack for this with less admin involved?
solution tired before-A delivery plan board, cross team collab project and dependency board but its a lot of admin

Related

Azure boards: new project vs new team within a project - what are the trade offs?

I am about to start a project for which we will use Azure Boards to track progress of our work items in Kanban-style. Would like to ask a high level question as I am a beginner in Azure boards and have to make a decision on how to set up 11 Kanban boards.
We have decided it makes sense to have 11 boards, one for each category of product in our company. A few pointers:
There will be a single team working through the work items in the eleven boards
There will be moments where the team will be working simultaneously with more than one board
The eleven boards should contain the same team members / columns, as the workflow is exactly the same across those 11 boards
My question: should we create 11 different projects OR 11 teams within a project to get our eleven boards? What kind of rationale would make me want to create different projects as opposed to different teams?
Thank you
When to add another project
In general, we recommend that you use a single project to support your organization or enterprise. A single project minimizes the maintenance of administrative tasks and supports the most optimized / full-flexibility cross-link object experience.
Even if you have many teams working on hundreds of different applications and software projects, you can most easily manage them within a single project. A project serves to isolate data stored within it. You can't easily move data from one project to another. When you move data from one project to another, you typically lose the history associated with that data.
Reasons to add another project:
You may want to add another project in following instances:
To prohibit or manage access to the information contained within a
project to select groups
To support custom work tracking processes for specific business units
within your organization
To support entirely separate business units that have their own
administrative policies and administrators
To support testing customization activities or adding extensions
before rolling out changes to the working project
To support an Open Source Software (OSS) project
If the above conditions are not met, we generally recommend that you create multiple teams in a project. Here is the official document you can refer to.

Which is better for task management?

Microsoft Planner or Azure DevOps
We need to keep a track of tasks assigned to DevOps teammates.
I checked Azure Devops.
Azure DevOps gives you tasks and issue so that you can assign it to the members.
Not sure what MS Planner offers and should we chose that over Azure DevOps
Microsoft Planner is a task planning tool integrated in Office 365.
The level of capability from low to higher is corresponding task management to project portfolio management.
For a detail tutorial you could take a look at this link: Microsoft Planner - Step-by-step guide for users
Azure DevOps is a cloud-side source code management system also offering project management features as part of Microsoft's application life cycle management solutions. More project management features are accessible.
In Azure DevOps, you could also track work with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting.
Combine drag-and-drop sprint planning and flexible work item tracking with comprehensive traceability to have the perfect home for all your ideas–big and small.
You could also use the visualization options provided by Delivery Plans to review the schedule of stories or features your teams plan to deliver. Delivery Plans show the scheduled work items by sprint (iteration path) of selected teams against a calendar view.
Delivery plans is also interactive. You can change the assigned sprint of a work item by dragging it to a new sprint as shown in the above image.
I couldn't directly give you an accurate answer which one is better, it's all based on you and your team's requirement. They are totally two different products. Please kindly select the one suitable for your sides.

VSTS kanban board to manage multiple projects

I recently inherited the management of a few legacy applications and the associated development team of 3. Currently, the team manages work visa emails. There is no central place to see all work. Some of the projects have their own VSTS sites.
I would like have a single/ unified intake process, work board. Is there a way to have a VSTS site sit on top of other VSTS sites to provide this view. Other option I can think of is to bring in these applications as separate repositories under a single VSTS site ( assuming VSTS allows this).
Anyone with prior experience, please suggest other ways to do it. Yes, I am stuck with VSTS - corporate standard
If you are using git in VSTS, then you can have multiple repositories.
This would be a good approach. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/willy-peter_schaub/2014/11/19/many-git-repositories-but-one-team-project-to-rule-them-all/
Then you can create teams within the same team project to separate backlogs, sprints, kanbans for each team. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/work/scale/multiple-teams?view=vsts
You will also be able to see a kanban/backlog for the full team and you could even use the Plans hub to group all your teams together in a unified view. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/work/scale/review-team-plans?view=vsts and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/work/backlogs/backlogs-boards-plans?view=vsts

Differences of Bug tracking in Agile process and Scrum process of VSTS 2017?

With the ability to configure how the bugs should manage, I'm confuse what to select as a process when I create a team project in VSTS 2017.
In the Microsoft guidance they say Agile
works great if you want to track user stories and (optionally) bugs on the Kanban board, or track bugs and tasks on the task board.
But even I select Scrum as the process, the bugs can be configure not to manage on the Kanban board.
and further
Choose Agile when your team uses Agile planning methods, including Scrum, and tracks development and test activities separately.
Isn't this same even I select Scrum as the process? I couldn't see any differences from the interfaces.
Of cause by choosing, Agile I can track original estimation and the completed work alone with the reaming work.
So what are the other differences, which I go for a one over the other? May be some reports like Stories Overview Report
Regarding Bug tracking, the workflows are different: Workflow states, transitions, and reasons.
For Agile process, the forecasting is based on Story Points and for Scrum process, it is based on Effort.
Regarding report, the link you provide is used for on-premises TFS. You can show report that you want in the custom widget or hub extension, so no difference.
Write your first extension for Visual Studio Team Services

Managing mutiple projects with Bluemix DevOps Track and Plan

We have several closely related DevOps projects each with their own jazz git repositories in our Bluemix DevOps account. Each project has its own stories/tasks/defects etc.
What is the current best method to gain a single view of the cumulative backlogs of all projects so we can have one place to prioritize items and plan sprints across all projects. If DevOps Track and Plan can not do this. Is there a 3rd party tool that can integrate with DevOps/Bluemix that will do this for us?
Not a perfect solution, but I asked a very similar question and have had success using the approach described for several projects:
How to manage multiple components with IBM Bluemix Track & Plan
This isn't a supported capability at the moment.
I've passed your question on to DevOps Services' developers. We're adding features to Bluemix and Bluemix DevOps Services all the time.